I banged forward with bigger and
bigger feet. A bird, scared, swooped almost into my face. Occasionally
some night-noise pricked a futile, minute hole in the enormous curtain of
soggy darkness. Uphill now. Every muscle thoroughly aching, head
spinning, I half-straightened my no longer obedient body; and jumped:
face to face with a little wooden man hanging all by itself in a grove of
low trees.
--The wooden body, clumsy with pain, burst into fragile legs with
absurdly large feet and funny writhing toes; its little stiff arms made
abrupt cruel equal angles with the road. About its stunted loins clung a
ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. On one terribly brittle
shoulder the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived. There
was in this complete silent doll a gruesome truth of instinct, a success
of uncanny poignancy, an unearthly ferocity of rectangular emotion.
For perhaps a minute the almost obliterated face and mine eyed one
another in the silence of intolerable autumn.
Who was this wooden man? Like a sharp black mechanical cry in the spongy
organism of gloom stood the coarse and sudden sculpture of his torment;
the big mouth of night carefully spurted the angular actual language of
his martyred body.
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