WHEN life is done—this life that galls and frets us, this life so full
of tears and doubts and dreads—the undertaker comes along and gets us,
and tucks us neatly in our little beds. When we are done with toiling,
hoarding, giving, when we are done with drawing checks and breath, he
comes to show us that the cost of living cuts little ice beside the cost
of death. I meet him daily in the street or alley, a cheerful man, he
dances and he sings; and we exchange the buoyant jest and sally, and
ne’er discourse of grim, unpleasant things. We talk of crops, the
campaign and the weather, the I. and R., the trusts—this nation’s curse;
no graveyard hints while we converse together, no reference to joyrides
in a hearse. And yet I feel—perchance it is a blunder—that as I stand
there, rugged, hale and strong, he’d like to ask me: “Comrade, why in
thunder and other things, do you hang on so long?” When I complain of
how the asthma tightens upon my lungs, and makes me feel a wreck, it
seems to me his face with rapture lightens, smiles stretch his lips and
wind around his neck. And when I say I’m feeling like a heifer turned
out to grass, or like a hummingbird, he heaves a sigh as gentle as a
zephyr, yet fraught with pain and grief and hope deferred.
[Illustration]
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