Death

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_ And that winter's coat, also, began to appear thin and threadbare.

By looking carefully, one could see that the twigs of the cherry tree were brightening with a delicate touch of fresh color, while the tiny tips of the tender green buds were cautiously peeping out of their snug wrappings as if to ask the state of the weather. In the orchard and the woods, too, the Life that slept deep in the roots and under the bark of trunks and limbs was beginning to stir as though, in its slumber, it heard Spring knocking at its bedroom door.

I do not know what business it was that called the man to a neighboring city. The particular circumstances that made the journey necessary are of no importance whatever to my story. The important thing is this: for the first time the man was forced to recognize, in his own life and in his work, the fact of Death. He came to see that, in the most abundant life, Death cannot be ignored. Because Death is one of the Thirteen Truly Great Things of Life, this is my story: that the man was introduced to Death.

Hurriedly he arranged for his absence, and, rushing home, packed a few necessities of travel in his grip, snatched a hasty dinner, and thus reached the depot just in time to catch the evening train. He would make the trip in the night, devote the following day to the business that demanded his presence, and the next night would return to his home city.

The Pullmans were well filled, mostly with busy, eager, men who, like himself, were traveling at night to save the daylight for their work. But the man, perhaps because he was tired with the labor of the day or because he wished to have for the business of the morrow a clear, vigorous, brain, made no effort to find acquaintances who might be on the train or to meet congenial strangers with whom to spend a pleasant hour. When he had read the evening papers and had outlined in his mind a plan of operation to meet the situation that compelled him to make the hurried trip, he retired to his berth.

The low, monotonous, hum of the flying wheels on the heavy steel rails; the steady, easy, motion of the express as it flew over the miles of well ballasted track; the dim light of the curtained berth, and the quiet of the Pullman, soon lulled the tired traveler to sleep. Mile after mile and mile after mile was marked off, with the steady regularity of time itself, by the splendidly equipped train as it rushed through the darkness with its sleeping passengers. Hamlets, villages, way stations, signal towers, were passed with flash like quickness; while the veteran in the engine cab, with the schooling of thirty years in the hand that rested on the throttle, gazed steadily ahead to catch, with quick eye and clear brain, the messages of the signal lamps that, like bright colored dots of a secret code, appeared on the black sheet of night.

With a suddenness that defies description, the change came.

The trained eyes that looked from the cab window read a message from Death in the night ahead. In the fractional part of a second, the hand on the throttle responded, doing in flash like movements all that the thirty years had taught it to do. There was a frightful jarring, jolting crash of grinding, screaming, brakes, followed on the instant by a roaring, smashing, thundering, rending of iron and steel and wood.

The veteran, whose eye and brain and hand had been thirty years in service, lay under his engine, a mangled, inanimate mass of flesh; His fireman, who had looked forward to a place on the engineer's side of a cab as a young soldier dreams of sword and shoulder straps, lay still beside his chief. From the wrecked coaches, above the sound of hissing steam and crackling flames, came groans and shrieks and screams of tortured men and women and children.

Then, quickly, the hatless, coatless, and half dressed forms of the more fortunate ones ran here and there. Voices were heard calling and answering. There were oaths and prayers and curses mingled with sharp spoken commands and the sound of axes and saws and sledges, as the men, who a few minutes before were sleeping soundly in their berths, toiled with superhuman energy to free their fellows from that horrid hell.

To the man who had escaped from the trap of death that had caught so many of his fellow passengers and who toiled now with the strength of a giant among the rescuers, it all seemed a dream of terror from which he must presently awake. He did not think, then, of the Death that had come so close while he slept. He was not conscious of the danger that had threatened him. He did not feel gratitude for his escape. He could not think. He could only strive madly, with the strength of despair, in the fight to snatch others from the grip of an awful fate; and, as he fought, he prayed to be awakened from his dream.

It was over at last.

Hours later, the man reached his destination, and still, because his business was so urgent, there was no time for him to think of the Death that had come so close. Rarely does the business of life give men time to think of the Death that stands never far away. But, when his work was finished and he was again aboard the train, on his way home, there was opportunity for a fuller realization of the danger through which he had passed so narrowly--there was time to think. Then it was that the man realized a new thing in his life. Then it was that a new factor entered into his thinking--Death. Not the knowledge of Death; he had always had that of course. Not the fear of Death; this man was no coward. But the fact of Death--it was the fact of Death that he realized now as he had never realized it before.

All unexpected and unannounced--without sign of its approach or warning of its presence--Death had stood over him. He had looked into the eyes of the King. Death had touched him on the shoulder, as it were, and had passed on. But Death would come again. The one firmly fixed, undeniable, unalterable, fact in Life was, to him, now, that Death would come again. When or how; that, he could not know; perhaps not for many years; perhaps before the flying train could carry him another mile. How strange it is that this one fixed, permanent, unalterable, inevitable fact of Life--Death--is most commonly ignored. The most common thing in Life is Death; yet few there are who recognize it as a fact until it presents itself saying: "Come."

Going back into the years, the man recalled the death of his mother; and, later, when he was standing on the very threshold of his manhood, the death of his father. Those graves on the hillside were still in his memory but they had not realized Death for him. His grief at the loss of those so dear to him had overshadowed, as it were, the fact of Death itself. He thought of Death only as it had taken his parents; he did not consider it in thinking of himself. But now--now--he had looked into the eyes of the King. He had felt the touch of the hand that chills. He had heard the voice that cannot be disobeyed. Death had come into his life a fact.

The low, steady, hum and whirr of the wheels and the smooth, easy movement of the train told him of the flying miles. One by one, those miles that lay between him and the end of his journey would go until the last was gone and he would step from the coach to the platform of his home depot. And, then, all suddenly, to the man, those flying miles became as the years of his life. Even as the miles of his journey were passing so his years had gone--so his years were going and would go.

The man was a young man still. For the first time, he felt himself growing old. Involuntarily he looked at his hands; firm, strong, young hands they were, but the man, in his fancy, saw them shaking, withered, and parched, with prominent dull blue veins, and the skinny fingers bent and crooked with the years. He glanced down at his powerful, full moulded limbs, and, in fancy, saw them thin and shrunken with age. And, suddenly, he remembered with a start that the next day would be his birthday. In the fullness of his young manhood's strength, he had ignored the passing years even as he had ignored Death. As he had learned to forget Death, he had learned to forget his birthdays. It was strange how fast the years were going, thought the man. Scarcely would there be time for the working out of his dreams. And, once, it had been such a long, long, time between his birthdays. Once, he had counted the months, then the weeks, then the days that lay between. Once, he remembered--

Perhaps it was the thought of his birthday that did it; perhaps it was the memory of those graves in the old cemetery at home. Whatever it was, the man slipped back into his Yesterdays when birthdays were ages and ages apart and, more than anything else in the world, the boy wanted to grow up.

At seven, he had looked with envy upon the boy of nine while the years of grown up men were beyond his comprehension. At nine, fifteen was the daring limit of his dreams; so far away it seemed that scarcely he hoped to reach it. As for eighteen--one must be very, very, old, indeed, to be eighteen. How long the years ahead had seemed, then--and now, how short they were when looking back! And the birthdays--the birthdays that the man had learned to forget--how could he have learned to forget them! What days of triumph--what times of victorious rejoicing--those days once had been! And so, with the fact of Death so recently forced into his life, with the miles as years slipping under the fast whirring wheels that bore him onward, the man lived again a birthday in the long ago.

Weeks before that day the boy had planned the joyous occasion, for mother had promised that he should have a party. A birthday party! Joyous festival of the Yesterdays! What delightful hours were spent in anticipation! What innumerable questions were asked! What a multitude of petitions were formed and presented! What anxious consultations with the little girl who lived next door! What suggestions were offered, accepted and rejected, and rejected or accepted all over again! What lists of the guests to be invited were made, revised and then revised again! What counting of the days, and, as the day drew near, what counting of the hours; not forgetting, all the time, to hint, in various skillfully persuasive and suggestive ways, as to the presents that would be most fitting and acceptable! And at last, when the day had come, as all days must at last come, was there ever in the history of mortal man or boy such a day?

There was real wealth of love in mother's kiss that morning. There was holy pleasure in the pride that was in father's face and voice. There was unmarred joy when the little girl captured him and, while he pretended--only pretended--to escape, gave him the required number of thumps on the back with her soft little fist and the triumphant "one to grow on." Then came, at last, the crowning event: and so the man saw, again, the boys and girls who, that afternoon in his Yesterdays, helped to celebrate his birthday. Why had he permitted them to pass out of his life? Why had he gone out of their lives? Why must the years rob him of the friends of the Yesterdays?

With the birthday feast of good things and the games and sports of childhood the busy afternoon passed. Up and down the road and across the fields, the guests departed, with their party dresses soiled, their party combed hair disheveled, and their party cleaned faces smudged with grime; but with the clean, clean, joy of the Yesterdays in their clean, clean, childish hearts. Together the boy and the girl watched them go, with waving hands and good-bye shouts, until the last one had passed from sight and the last whoop and call had died away. And then, reluctantly, the little girl herself went home and the boy was left alone by the garden hedge.

Oh, brave, brave, day of the Yesterdays! Brave birthdays of the long ago when Death was not a fact but a fiction! When the years were ages apart, and the farthest reach of one's imagination carried only to being grown up!

From his Yesterdays the man came back to wonder: if Death should wait until he was wrinkled, bent, and old--until his limbs were palsied, his hearing gone, his voice cracked and shrill, and his eyes dim--if Death should let him stay until he had seen the last of his companions go home in the evening after that last birthday--would there be one to stand beside him--to watch with him as the others passed from sight? Would there be anyone to help him celebrate his last birthday, if Death should fail to come again until he was old?

* * * * *

Everyone was very kind to the woman that morning when the word came that her uncle had been killed in a railroad accident. All that kind hearts could do for her was done. Every offer of assistance was made. But there was really nothing that anyone could do just then. She must first go as quickly as she could to her aunt.

The man of authority, who had always seemed to understand her woman heart and who had paid to her the highest tribute possible for a man to pay a woman, had broken the news to her as gently as news of Death can be told, and, as soon as she was ready, his own carriage was waiting before the entrance in the street below. Nor did he burden her with talk as they were driven skillfully through the stream of the down town traffic and then, at a quicker pace, through the more open streets of the residence district.

There is so little that can be said, even by the most thoughtful, when Death enters thus suddenly into a life. The man knew that the woman needed him. He knew that, save for the invalid aunt, there was now no near relative to help her do the necessary things that must be done. There was no one to help her think what would be best to do. So he asked her gently, as they neared the house, if she would not permit him, for the next few days, to take the place in her life that would have been taken by an older brother. Kindly he asked that she trust him fully--that she let him think and do for her--be a help to her in her need--even as he would have helped her had she consented to come into his life as he wished her to come. And the woman, because she knew the goodness and honor of this man's heart, thanked him with gratitude too great for words and permitted him to do for her all that a most intimate relative would have done.

At last it was over. The first uncontrollable expressions of grief--the arrangements for the funeral--the service at the house and the long ride to the cemetery with the final parting and the return to the house that would never again be quite the same--all those hard, first, days were past and to-morrow--to-morrow--the woman would go back to her work. In the final going over of affairs, the finishing of unfinished business, the ending of undeveloped plans and prospects, the settling and closing of accounts, and the considering of new conditions enforced by Death, it had been made very clear that for the woman to work was, now, more than ever necessary. There was, now, no one but her upon whom the invalid aunt could depend for even the necessities of life.

And the woman was glad that she was able to provide for that one who had always been so gentle, so patient, in suffering and who, in her sorrow, was now so brave. Since the death of the girl's own mother, the aunt had taken, so far as she could, a mother's place in the life of the child; and, as the years had passed and the little girl had grown into young womanhood, she had grown into the heart of the childless woman until she was as a daughter of her own flesh. So the woman did not feel this added care that was forced upon her by the changed conditions as a burden other than a burden of love. But still, that afternoon, when it was all over, and she faced the new future that Death had set before her, she realized the fact of Death as she had never realized it before.

The years since her mother's death had not been many, and, it seemed to her, now, that they had passed very quickly. She was only a little girl, then, and her uncle and his wife had taken her so fully into their hearts that she had scarcely felt the gap in her life after the first weeks of the separation had passed. Her mother belonged to the days of her childhood and, though the years were not many as she looked back, those childhood days seemed far, far, away. Death had come to her, now, in the days of her womanhood. Suddenly, unexpectedly, with awful, startling, reality, the fact of Death had come into her life; forcing her to consider, as she had never considered before, the swiftly passing years.

What--she asked herself as she thought of the morrow--what, for her, lay at the farthermost end of that procession of to-morrows? When the best of her strength was gone with the days and weeks and months and years--what then? When Death should come for that one who was, in everything but blood, her mother and who was, now, her only companion--what then? To be left alone in the world--to go, alone, all the rest of the journey--this was the horror that Death brought to her. As she looked, that afternoon, into the years that were to come, this woman, who knew that she was a woman, and who was still in the glory and beauty of her young womanhood, felt suddenly old--she felt as though every day of the sad days just passed had been a year.

And then, at last, from her grief of the present and from her contemplation of the years that were to come, she turned wearily back to the long ago. In the loneliness and sorrow of her life she went, again, hack into her Yesterdays. There was, indeed, no other place for her to go but back into her Yesterdays. Only in the Yesterdays can one escape the sadness and loneliness that attend the coming of Death. Death has little power in the Yesterdays. In childhood life, Death is not a fact.

Funerals were nothing more than events of surpassing interest in those days--a subdued, intense, interest that must not be too openly expressed, it is true, but that nevertheless could not be altogether suppressed. Absorbed in her play the little girl would hear, suddenly, the ringing of the bell in the white church across the valley; and it would ring, not joyously, cheerily, interestingly, as on Sundays but with sad, solemn, measured, notes, that would fill her childish heart with hushed excitement. And then--it mattered not where he was or what he was doing--the little boy would come, rushing with eager haste, to join her at the front gate where they always watched together for the procession and strove for the honor of sighting first the long string of vehicles that would soon appear on one of the four roads leading to the church. And oh, joy of joys, if it so happened that the procession came by the way that led past the place where they danced with such eager impatience!

First would come, moving with slow feet and drooping head, the old gray horse and time worn phaeton of the minister; and they would feel a little strange and somewhat hurt because the man of God, who usually greeted them so cheerily, would not notice them as he passed. But the sadness in their hearts would be forgotten the next moment as they gazed, with excited interest and whispered exclamations, at the shining, black, hearse with its beautiful, coal black, horses that, stepping proudly, tossing their plumed heads, and shaking the tassels on the long nets that hung over their glossy sides, seemed to invite the admiration that greeted them. And then, through the glass sides of the hearse, the boy and the girl, with gasps of interest, would discover the long black coffin half hidden by its load of flowers; or, perhaps, the hearse, the horses, and the coffin, would all be snow white which, the little girl thought, was prettiest of all. Then would follow the long line of carriages, filled with people who wore their Sunday clothes; and the boy and the girl, recognizing a friend or acquaintance, here and there, would wonder to themselves how it would seem to be riding in such a procession. One by one, they would count the vehicles and recall the number in the last funeral they had watched; gleefully triumphant, if this procession were longer than the last; scornfully disappointed, if it were not so imposing. And then, when the last carriage had gone up the hill on the other side of the creek and had disappeared from sight among the trees that half hid the church, they would wait for the procession to reappear after the services and would watch it crawling slowly along the distant road on its way to the cemetery.

And the next day they would play a funeral.

Even as they had played a wedding, they would play a funeral. Only, they played a wedding but that once, while they played funerals many, many, times.

Sometimes it would be a doll's funeral when the chief figure in the solemn rites would be taken from the grave, after it was all over, and would be rocked to sleep with the other dollies, none the worse, apparently, for the sad experience. Again, the part of the departed would be taken by a mouse that had met a violent death at the hands of the cook; or, perhaps, they would find a baby bird that had fallen from its nest before its wings were strong. But the grandest, most triumphant, most successful funeral of the Yesterdays was a kitten that had most opportunely died the very day a real grown up funeral had passed the house. What a funeral that was--with an old shoe box for a coffin, the boy's wagon draped with pieces of black cloth borrowed from the rag bag for a hearse, the shepherd dog for a proudly stepping team, and all the dolls in their carriage following slowly behind! In a corner of the garden, not far from the cherry tree, they dug a real grave and set up a real tombstone, fashioned by the boy, to mark the spot. And the little girl was so earnest in her sorrow that she cried real tears at which the boy became, suddenly, very gay and boisterous, as boys will upon such occasions, and helped her to forget right quickly.

Oh, boy of the Yesterdays, who would not let his little girl mate grieve but made her laugh and forget! Where was he now? The woman wondered. Had Death come into his life, too? Were the years ever, to him, as a funeral procession? Did ever he feel that he was growing old? Could he, now, make her forget her grief--could he help her to laugh again--or had his power gone even as those Yesterdays when Death, too, was only a pleasing game?

From the next room, a gentle voice called softly and the woman arose to go to her aunt. For that one who was left dependent upon her she would be brave and strong--she would go back to her work in the morning.

Only children are privileged to play with the fact of Death. Only in the Yesterdays are funerals events of merely passing interest. Only in the Yesterdays does Death go always past the door. _

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