The Man Who Lived in a Shoe

by Henry James Forman

"You will hear from me again before long."

As I read, I felt gradually overshadowed by the immense somber fact conveyed in this letter. It was like a black cloud bank that comes up swiftly, blotting out the sun from over the landscape. It was not a thing to blink, to wave aside or to dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders. It was instant and tyrannous, demanding anew urgent thought and decision. Fortunately I am no longer the same creature that was bodily hurled from tranquillity and leisure, like a monk from his cell, into the cold wind-swept ways of life. I seem a little less like chaff in the breeze. My backbone seemed actually to stiffen and settle as I posed the problem.

The problem is the fate of the children. To receive and re-create Pendleton means to give them up.

Well—and did I not assume their care only because there was none else? Now there would be—there might be—some one else. Pendleton has a legal right to his own children and, if he could establish it satisfactorily, no doubt a moral right as well.

The advent of Pendleton might prove to have incalculable advantages for myself. Here, on the one side, is the treadmill. On the other there is, or there was, ease and leisure and dreams. My small competency is gone in the wake of that man's destructive progress. But for myself, I might manage an easier and more agreeable way of subsisting than the way of Visconti's. Those are the cold facts, clearly enough—but somehow they will not let me rest. My world has been violently jarred, for all my painful calmness, and I seem unable to fit the parts again into exactly the old solidity of groove and joint. There are lurking interstices which I cannot fill. "Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?" the hero of an unforgettable tale was wont to ask himself. And he felt his soul floating off and dipping into the infinite. Likewise, I ask myself now, Who is Randolph Byrd? And the startling truth returns that the children in my house and I are inseparable, that I and they are one!

With this and the fact that Pendleton is in all likelihood coming back to claim them, I am, pending further news from Dibdin, left to grapple. At any rate, Dibdin also is returning.

It is now the spring and the year is beginning to smile again. I have been prospering at Visconti's and my income is now again the same as it was before ever the children came to me—before I became a business man. But there is not a soul to whom I can confide my new dilemma.

There is Minot Blackden, the glass stainer, whom I have finally discovered to be a near neighbor of Visconti's. To be exact, his studio and living quarters are in King Street, and we sometimes have our lunch together. But Blackden is so much in the grip of his medieval art that it gets into his food, stains his tapering hands and even spatters upon his finely pointed blue-black beard. All he can see in me is the Philistine who has cast all else aside for the sizzling fleshpots. When I chanced to mention having four children in my house, he looked upon me as a bird-of-Paradise might look upon a polar bear; I was to him a visible but incredible symbol of something strange and gross. There is nothing placid or resigned about Blackden. He is intense, incandescent.

"Do you realize," he said to me, "that I am restoring a lost art to the world?"

"But does it give you food?" I asked him.