The road was covered with red and yellow leaves. Rugo Amietieve, who said that he was an Armenian, had wished one of those lingering good-byes to this rotund and plentiful day that only a man of slow and methodical mind can bring into being. He bid it adieu with more than the silence and the love of his heart; he had whispered over it, his square yellow teeth a little apart and touching the moist curve of his under-lip with the small round point of flesh that clung to his upper like a tear. He said good-bye resolutely and quite peacefully, with the restraint of a man who knows what’s bad for him and why. Rugo did not want to leave the country, but he had to. He knew why he did not want to, and he knew why he was being forced to—necessity—that was it, necessity had been hurrying his people about the world from the beginning of time and would hurry them.

Farewell held no piquancy for him, he did not tear out his heart by his departure; there was nothing in the fact of the sunlight and the blowing and dying leaves that gave him sweet pain and too heavy sorrow; the red of the fallen apples sent no pang into the very midst of his being. On the contrary Rugo Amietieve felt only that sense of loss that a good housewife feels when she is letting a rich quilt out of her fingers. In the soil, as Rugo had known it, had been life, hard and fragrant. He had toiled at the plough grumbling, but sensing, with a slow, precise pleasure, that the air was warm and good and healthy. He had tended his geese and his cows with the same stolid satisfaction, and he watched them moving about, leaning on his two folded and brown hands. The ducks’ yellow, gaping mouths gave him physical pleasure, he would have liked to press his hand over them where they were all shining and brittle; it would have given him as much pleasure as a flower petal—more, because these living things that cackled and spread their wings and brought forth young were profitable also—the world lived here and moved, and its incidental placing of him where he could profit by it was the thing that amazed and satisfied him.

Now it was otherwise. He must go away into the city where, they said, nothing was fresh and new and living. His uncle had died, leaving him his little tailoring establishment on the East Side. There Rugo was bound, there from this day forward he would sit and sew interminably as though he were a machine—as though he had suddenly died and had to work.

He lifted his straight nose and smelled the September air. Here the woods dipped over the road, spilling shadows gigantic and restless, with a speckling of ragged sun patches like flowers. Mosquitoes came up from the swamp as the night descended and sang about Rugo’s ears and set him swearing. They got into the long, tangled meshes of his beard and clung there; they sat in among these thick, ruddy strands and hissed against the shuddering flesh of his cheeks. He lifted one of his hands and struck his face on either side, and went on.

The next morning the East Side, in the early Thirties, saw a stranger sweeping out what had been old Amietieve’s shop. Rugo looked about him with sad eyes. The room was twelve feet by twenty-four and the back part was curtained off by a hanging of dull green, sprinkled over with pink roses; a small cot bed was thus hidden from the front of the shop. It was within these four walls that Rugo must live. He turned around in it, sniffing the air with his long nose, laid back again as he had done in the last hour in the country. He sneered. “You’re a little fool room,” he said, “to be so small.” It was as if he were shaking it, as a child is shaken and held up to learn by another’s larger and more important example. He held this room up by the scruff of its neck and shook it in the face of the thirty acres he had known, and he sneered upon it.

He had learned the trade when still a child, when this same uncle had been guardian, but his fingers were freedom clumsy and he broke the needle.

Work came hesitatingly and painfully. Rugo was a slow man, and at this task he was still more laborious and backward. He toiled far into the night seated upon his table, his goose between his knees. People walking by on their way home sometimes peered in over the top of the cardboard sign specked by the flies and the open fashion book with its strange, angular, shiny gentlemen carrying canes and looking over their shoulders playfully as if they were keeping something very amusing in their minds to hand out like favours; and such people often said, “That chap will die of consumption, you see.”

The butcher’s shop across the way seemed to be vying with the remnants of silks and serge in Rugo’s window. There were rump ends and flanks and knuckle bones, remnants of some fine animal, all wonderful and red and satiny yellow where the layers of fat crept out like frostings, or where fat spread over kidneys like irregular lace; yet to Rugo they were somehow painful, they made him think of the cows and the poultry that he had so often gazed fondly upon, of the animal life he had grown up among, and he turned his head away and went on stitching.

Rugo got his own breakfast, lunch, dinner. Behind the curtain there, beside his bed, was a small gas stove. In the Winter the shop was deadly with heavy air. He could not open the door or he would have flooded the place in a moment with cold, piercing and cruel, so he sat in the foul air of a gas burner, and his eyes grew so dark in the paling face that the children of the neighbourhood called him “Coal Eye.”

In the Summer business had picked up, though Rugo seldom had any time to himself. He worked quicker, but then orders were more plentiful on patches, turnings and pressings. He had become attached to a small, ill and very slender Italian girl who came once with her father’s coat.

Her straight parted dark hair made him think of animals, he thought her gentle and Madonna-like, not taking into account a small, cruel and avaricious mouth. It was very red and he was pleased with it. Almost anything bright pleased him. The very fact that these lips were cruel pleased him, though he did not know that it was the brightness of calculation that made them attractive to him.

Rugo was not a good-looking man, but this did not trouble him; he was as good-looking as anyone he had ever seen, and therefore he was unconscious that for so large a head, his body was rather small.

This girl Addie told him. It hurt him, because he was beginning to like her. He noticed that when his lip trembled her eyes got very bright. “Why,” he asked her, puzzled, “do you always look so pretty when you say things like that?”

This flattered her, but it only made it worse for Rugo. She was indeed a very common woman, with a little to make her young and pretty, and she made the most of it.

Finally he spoke to her quietly and slowly about love and marriage. Of course Addie, in her shrewd mind, had calculated on this; his was a business that threatened to prosper, and she was attracted to him, anyway. She made her plans accordingly; she acted displeased.

“You are a poor, common tradesman,” she said bitterly, as if she were something uncommon and therefore beyond him. He felt this, too, and instead of discovering her own smallness in the retort, he only got the point she wanted him to get. He began to think himself below her. He raised his hand:

“What do you want that I shall do?”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders and laughed, showing a red tongue that seemed to crouch in her mouth in a long, dented line.

“But I must do something, you say I am only——”

“You shall never be anything else.”

“True, but I may be more.”

“Hardly.”

“Why do you say ‘hardly’?”

“You are not the sort of person—now, for instance——”

“Yes?” he questioned slowly, turning around and looking into her face.

“Well, for instance, you are hardly a hero.”

“Are heroes the style?” he asked pitifully. This made her laugh even harder.

“Not in your family, I take it.”

He nodded. “Yes, that’s true—we were always quiet people. You do not like quiet people?”

“They are like women,” she answered.

He pondered awhile over this. He shook his head; after all he knew better and he was angry because he had been letting Addie lie to him.

“That is not true.”

She began to scream at him:

“So, that’s the way you begin, calling me a liar, is it?” She put her hands into her hair on either side and tore at it. This had even more of an effect upon Rugo than she had expected. He beat his hands together. In spoiling the perfect oval of her head, in ruinously shaking its smooth and parted hair, she had hurt him as much as if she had shaken a holy picture.

“No, no,” he cried. “I will do something, you shall see—it is all right—it is all right.” He approached her and, touching her shoulder with his hand, he added:

“For you I will do it—I will do it.”

She smiled. “You will do what, Rugo Amietieve?”

“I shall be less like a woman. You called me like a woman; well, you shall see.”

She came close to him, her two thin arms pressed close to her side.

“You will do something big and grand—Rugo—for me?”

He looked down at her, puzzled and quiet. The cruel mouth was half open, showing the shining line of her teeth. He nodded, but this time he moved away from her and stood staring out into the street.

She came up behind him, caught both of his hands, and, leaning forward, kissed him on the back of his neck. He tried to turn, but she held his two hands a moment longer and then broke out of the shop at a run.

Presently he set to work again, sitting cross-legged on his table.

He wondered what he was expected to do. He had often spoken to her of returning to the country, with a hint in his voice that she would be there beside him, too. Now it had come to this.

He pondered. A hero—what was a hero—what made the difference between a hero and himself, anyway? He remembered tales the gypsies had told him about their greatest men when he had been in the old land of his birth. They told a story of a lad who fought and fought, and finding himself unequal to the task of killing his rival, flung himself off a mountain.

What would be the use of that—he would die, and then he might as well not have lived. He thought of all the great people he had read of, or had heard of, or had known. There was Jean the blacksmith, who had lost an eye saving his child from a horse. If he lost an eye Addie would not like him.

Napoleon—there was a well-known man; he had done so many things, it seemed, for which people framed him in white enamel and hung him upon their bedroom walls; but chiefly he had been renowned for his killing. Rugo thought about that awhile and came to the illuminating conclusion that all heroes were men who killed or were killed.

Well, the last was impossible; if he was killed he might just as well have starved in the country and not have laid eyes on Addie. Therefore, he must kill—but what—but whom?

Of course, he might save something or somebody, but they would have to be in danger first, and there might not be any danger for days and days, and he was tired of waiting.

Presently he laid his work aside, lowered the shade, and, lying face down on his bed, he tried to think it all out clearly.

Presently he got a vivid picture of killing in his mind. He sat up and put his hands two or three times over his face. It was damp. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the carpet. His mind wandered. He thought of the ducks he had longed to stroke, of the gentle, feeding cows, of the fresh, clean air—then he thought again of Addie and of what he must do. He tried to picture himself killing someone. He put his two hands together and looked at them—there, that was the way. Then he smiled. His hands, set as they were, could not have choked anything larger than a thrush. He widened them, but he separated them instantly and rubbed them down his legs, breathing heavily. What a terrible business a hero’s was! He thought of the throbbing that must stop beneath such hands as his. He got up, shaking his shoulders from side to side as if his back hurt him. He pulled up the shade.

The butcher’s windows opposite attracted his attention. Two gas lights were burning there vividly. Rugo could see flanks of beef laid out in pans, little ruddy pools collecting about them like insertion. Fowl hung by the necks and several hams lured the passer-by as they swung softly this way and that.

He opened his door hesitatingly and shutting it carefully stepped out into the roadway.

He crossed over and leaned his head against the glass. He looked in very close now, and he could see the film that shrouded the dead eyes of the fowl and the hares. Slabs of liver laid out in heaps, flanked by cuts of tripe, drew his attention.

A strange sensation had hold of him in the pit of his stomach. It seemed to him that he was turning pale. He raised his hand to his beard and tugged at it.

Two or three red hairs separated and came out. He held them up between him and the light. Then he darted in the back door of the shop.

Presently he emerged carrying a box. With the furtive and hurried step of a man who is being observed he crossed the street. He opened the door of his own little shop and, locking it quickly, he put the box in the corner and turned down the light.

It was very dark and he stumbled. A little reflection came from the meat shop window and touched the rims of his cardboards, and his pattern book full of the funny strutting gentlemen. His heart was beating horribly against his side. He began to question himself and stopped. He could never do it unless he made his mind a resolute thing. He clenched his teeth, blinking his eyes as he did so. He began to shiver.

Presently he threw himself on the ground in the corner near the box, his arms over his head, his face flat upon the dust and grime of the boards. He must do it quickly—but he couldn’t do it.

His mind began to wander again. He thought of the road, red and yellow with the dying leaves of Autumn, of the great swaying shadows and the sunlight breaking in between in little jagged spots like flowers. He remembered the mosquitoes, and he got to his knees and let his hands hang down at his sides.

The Summer had always been so pretty; the rains left the fields so bright and sudden when they came into view over the top of the hill. The ploughing had been good, he had really enjoyed that after all, only then he had not known just how much he did enjoy it. What a pity that he had not known what a good thing it all was then.

Something moved beside him, breathing softly. He uttered a sharp cry and the same thing moved back, hitting a board, and was again silent.

He bent forward, thrust his two hands out, closed them—tighter, tighter and tighter. A faint cry, a little jerking to and fro—that was all.

He stood up and turned the light on. He looked at his hands. Then backing away from the corner, never letting his eyes rest there, he plunged his hands up to the elbows in a pail of water. He threw a cupful of it inside his shirt at the neck. He opened the door. Addie was there.

She came in softly, gently, insinuatingly. She could see by his face that something very horrible and necessary had been done. She saw by his face how it had hurt, by his hands what it must have cost him.

She came close to him. “What have you done, Rugo?” she said.

“I—I have killed,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“What—where?” She moved toward the centre of the room and then looked into the corner.

“That?” she began to laugh.

“Take it or leave it,” he said suddenly in a loud and penetrating voice.

She stooped and lifted it up—a small grey rabbit.

She laid it down again. She placed her arm about him.

“Come quickly,” she said. “Comb your hair.”

She pushed him into the street. She was afraid of him, for there was something strange and hard in his mouth and he walked putting each foot down very flat and steady.

“Where are you going? What are you going to do?” He did not seem to know that she was there, clinging to him, her arm about his waist. He had forgotten her. He looked up into the air, sniffing it and smiling.

“Come,” she said, “we are going to have your boots shined.”