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
swas, 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.