The Shoulders of Atlas | Page 8

with
pleased interest, Henry and Sylvia more slowly; yet they also had
expressions of pleasure, albeit restrained. Both strove to draw their
faces down, yet that expression of pleasure reigned triumphant,
overcoming the play of the facial muscles. They glanced at each other,
and each saw an angry shame in the other's eyes because of this joy.
But when they followed Martin Barnes and his assistants into the parlor,
where Abrahama White was laid in state, all the shameful joy passed
from their faces. The old woman in her last bed was majestic. The dead
face was grand, compelling to other than earthly considerations. Henry
and Sylvia forgot the dead woman's little store which she had left
behind her. Sylvia leaned over her and wept; Henry's face worked.
Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he, although much
younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful Abrahama White. He
remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead and majestic, with
something like the light of her lost beauty in her still face. It was like a
rose which has fallen in such a windless atmosphere that its petals
retain the places which they have held around its heart.

Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with
something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish
it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with
him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander.
He took his wife's little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly. Her
bony fingers clung gratefully to his.
When they were all out in the south room Flora Barnes spoke again. "I
have never seen a more beautiful corpse," said she, in exactly the same
voice which she had used before. She began taking off her large, white
apron. Something peculiar in her motion arrested Sylvia's attention. She
made a wiry spring at her.
"Let me see that apron," said she, in a voice which corresponded with
her action.
Flora recoiled. She turned pale, then she flushed. "What for?"
"Because I want to."
"It's just my apron. I--"
But Sylvia had the apron. Out of its folds dropped a thin roll of black
silk. Flora stood before Sylvia. Beads of sweat showed on her flat
forehead. She twitched like one about to have convulsions. She was
very tall, but Sylvia seemed to fairly loom over her. She held the black
silk out stiffly, like a bayonet.
"What is this?" she demanded, in her tense voice.
Flora twitched.
"What is it? I want to know."
"The back breadth," replied Flora in a small, scared voice, like the
squeak of a mouse.
"Whose back breadth?"

"Her back breadth."
"Her back breadth?"
"Yes."
"Robbing the dead!" said Sylvia, pitilessly. Her tense voice was
terrible.
Flora tried to make a stand. "She hadn't any use for it," she squeaked,
plaintively.
"Robbing the dead! Its bad enough to rob the living."
"She couldn't have worn that dress without any back breadth while she
was living," argued Flora, "but now it don't make any odds. It don't
show."
"What were you going to do with it?"
Flora was scared into a storm of injured confession. "You 'ain't any call
to talk to me so, Mrs. Whitman," she said. "I've worked hard, and I
'ain't had a decent black silk dress for ten years."
"How can you have a dress made out of a back breadth, I'd like to
know?"
"It's just the same quality that Mrs. Hiram Adams's was, and--" Flora
hesitated.
"Flora Barnes, you don't mean to say that you're robbing the dead of
back breadths till you get enough to make you a whole dress?"
Flora whimpered. "Business has been awful poor lately," she said. "It's
been so healthy here we've hardly been able to earn the salt to our
porridge. Father won't join the trust, either, and lots of times the
undertaker from Alford has got our jobs."
"Business!" cried Sylvia, in horror.

"I can't help it if you do look at it that way," Flora replied, and now she
was almost defiant. "Our business is to get our living out of folks' dying.
There's no use mincing matters. It's our business, just as working in a
shoe-shop is your husband's business. Folks have to have shoes and
walk when they're alive, and be laid out nice and buried when they're
dead. Our business has been poor. Either Dr. Wallace gives awful
strong medicine or East Westland is too healthy. We haven't earned but
precious little lately, and I need a whole black silk dress and they
don't."
Sylvia eyed her in withering scorn. "Need or not," said she, "the one
that owns this back breadth is going to have it. I rather think she ain't
going to be