The Man Who Lived in a Shoe

by Henry James Forman

On a sudden, as I peered again eagerly, I saw Pendleton's great hulk bending over her, with a look peculiar and intense, with a strange speculation in his eyes that froze me. His huge hands were spasmodically, irresistibly hovering as if to embrace her delicate unconscious shoulders. Before I knew it he was kissing her cheek and it was I—I—who felt his hot vile breath as though Alicia's face and mine were one!

I cried out in a torment of fury and pain, but only a hoarse distant sound as of some night bird issued out of my parched constricted throat.

I rattled the sash violently, seized the screen and ripped it out, tearing my hands with the cheap twisted screen frame, though I was unaware of it then. The thin opaque shade flapped defiantly in my face. And all at once I heard a piercing scream—the terrified voice of Alicia!

Rage maddened me. And because of my state, I experienced difficulty, this time of all times, in entering the window out of which normally I stepped with ease. I stumbled, slipped, fell, rose again and leaped into the room like a maniac.

But Griselda, drawn by Alicia's scream, no doubt, was already filling the doorway, facing Pendleton, and with a look of concentrated hatred that remains engraved in my memory she was saying:

"Ye blackguard! Ye vile, black-hearted blackguard!"

With a wild leap to my table I seized a pointed bronze paper cutter. I should have plunged it into his heart, but for the swift intervention of the aged Griselda.

"No!" she cried huskily, seizing the blade, "we need nae add murder to this!"

I dropped the paper cutter to the floor and threw myself at the purple throat of the beast Pendleton. For a moment the guilty hang-dog look left his eyes and with an oath he thrust out his open hands against my face to throw me off. I was blinded by his huge hot palms against my eyes but I clung convulsively to his throat. His hands spasmodically closed about my neck; a momentary blackness fell upon me but I clung, my fingers eating more savagely into the hateful flesh of his throat. The pent-up force of years of hostility was that instant in my destroying hands. He gurgled and gasped and reeled backward.

In the meanwhile Alicia, emerging from her bewilderment and realizing the scene enacting itself with lightning-like rapidity, gave a low cry and sat up, moaning with terror. This vision of Alicia recalled me to myself. I flung his head away from me and I myself staggered backward with the force of my effort. I was breathing like a wrestler as I stood leaning with one hand upon the table. I could not speak.