The Man at the Window

In the years before World War I, Mr. Harold Tucker, of No. 3, Somerset Street, was a wealthy and respected Bristol greengrocer. Many a Sunday afternoon his neighbors nodded in satisfaction at the sight of him and five handsome daughters driving out in a fine rig along the West Country roads. But much time has passed since then, and with it Mr. Tucker and all but one of the girls. Florence died in girlhood; Nancy married and died before middle-age; Clara and Rose followed in turn. Only Miss Louisa, the eldest, was left to live on in the old house. So, at any rate, thought the neighbors. They had not seen Miss Louisa much of late, but they remembered her as "a sweet old lady," agile of mind and firm of purpose.

One midnight last week, the quiet of Bristol was rent by piercing screams in Somerset Street. Neighbors looked up at No. 3 and saw 84-year-old Miss Louisa standing at a shattered window hurling money, clothes and old bottles into the garden. Behind her stood the gaunt, naked figure of a man calling plaintively for help. The horrified neighbors sent a hurry call to the police.

The police arrived soon afterward, burst open the door of the old house and picked their way through a jungle of cobwebs, worm-ridden period furniture, a hall jammed with bottles of curdled milk and old clothes piled higher than a man's shoulders. A menagerie of budgereegahs, canaries, pigeons, dogs and cats had added their meed to the midden. Cowering in a corner, covered only by a tattered red blanket, hunched the man who had screamed at the window. His matted beard reached his knees. The nails of his toes and fingers curled in uncut proliferation. The police soon identified him as "young Harry Tucker," a nephew reported to have died or left England 30 years ago.

How or why Miss Louisa had kept him hidden through all the long years of war, draft-boards, ration books and national registration could only be guessed at. Some neighbors gossiped that he was Rose's illegitimate son, hidden to avoid family scandal. Louisa herself could not enlighten them. She was carried off to a local hospital with a paralyzing cerebral hemorrhage. Nor could Henry. Scrubbed and trimmed, he was being cared for in a mental hospital only a mile or two away. He knew he had lived through a war, he said, because he had heard bombs; he had been told the King was dead, but knew little else of the world's past three decades. An amiable and uncomplaining model patient, he was suffering, said the doctor in charge, "from a gross form of mental apathy and a schizophrenic disorder from which recovery will inevitably be slow."

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