The Man Who Lived in a Shoe

by Henry James Forman

I can write this almost calmly now because so much has passed since that dreadful evening and details begin to emerge cloudily from the fog of that confusion.

I remember striking out homeward from the station down our drably progressive suburban Main Street, following the bumping, grinding, loitering trolley across the little bridge over a stream that sends up a dank, fishy odor, though all the living things I have ever seen in its neighborhood were mosquitoes and water snakes.

Over the rusty iron parapet I stood leaning for a few minutes and the original thought feebly stirred my dazed brain that life was not so much a dream—as the Spaniard Calderon would have it—as it is a stream. There is no knowing what it may not bring upon its bosom.

"That's it," I muttered to myself aloud. "Life is a stream within a dream."

"That's about the size of it," gruffly remarked a passing laborer behind me, his dinner pail clanking against his side, and he burst into a hoarse guffaw.

I laughed too, and concluded that I was still maudlin at the end of my perfect day.

I left the bridge and the highway, turned to the right and began to climb the ill-lighted crooked street, anciently a Dutch cattle track, no doubt, that leads to my isolated châlet upon the rock.

With all geography, history, the visible and invisible universe to draw upon, the fathers of Crestlands had denominated this obscure street Milwaukee Avenue. Milwaukee Avenue put the last touch to my nightmarish state. A sickly laugh escaped me as I bent my back to the ascent.

A young mounted policeman, who rode like another Lancelot by this remote Shalott, interrupted his tune long enough to give me a cheery greeting and rode on humming to himself.

The September evening was mild and I vaguely purposed walking past my house and strolling about for a bit before I went in. It was early for returning from dinner in town, and I was not overanxious to encounter anybody. A sudden sense of something eerie and awesome came to me as I looked at that deeply shadowed cottage. It appeared unfamiliarly remote, detached, and I gazed upon it with a weird sense of foreboding that sent a slight shiver down my back. The window shades of the châlet were drawn with only their rectangular lines of light showing through,—light, I reflected bitterly, by which Pendleton was no doubt beguiling Alicia to desert my house and follow him.