Between the Living and the Dead
We were three—a man, a child, and I who am a woman. It was in the winter, and the man sat always at the front window of the third story opposite me, and the child in the parlor two stories below; and I from my second story saw them both. If they saw me, or seeing noted me, I do not know, but I think they did: for we were kin, and the only kin in all that life that hurried round us, up and down, up and down. Ah, the long agony of those endless days, while we stayed watching the snow floating in the merciless atmosphere and the living people going up and down—we the unburied dead who from our coffin windows looked out!
The man sat always propped among his pillows with his feet stretched out on the windowsill, looking down, wearily down. I, who could not sit nor lie, stood with my forehead upon the panes of glass, listening to the never ending roar of the machinery of my own body, the engine beat of a sick heart. And the child, ah well, the child with her ghastly face and sullen blue eyes, sat staring outward at the snow and the life that was all denied her;—such a young child, with the glory of youth yet shining in her mass of pale hair. And we thought, we three, as we gazed at the others, busy, so busy with life, “Ah, they too must die soon. The woman who sweeps the pavement there, impatient of the falling snow, she too must suffer; yet a little while she too must suffer and die. One day she will go in and close the door behind her, and never come out again. Those men who tramp so lustily, forcing back the cold and the snow with their hot hearts and limbs, they are tramping straight towards it, that last door which will open to them the fore-halls of death, wherein they, too, must sit unburied—long perhaps, like us. Ah, what is the use of it all? Why go up and down so? Why wait so long since the end is the same? Why not make an end? Why not make an end?”
But the will to make an end was dead also, so we stayed on, looking from our coffins at the world that did not interest us, to which we did not belong—dead things with living eyes. But there came a day, a soft, stray day that had wandered among the winter rigors, a day with a blue sky and a flood of golden glamors, when Life, in mockery, called luringly from afar to her forsaken children. I leaned out over my casement, and looked at that swift runlet of being passing by, then up at the man and down at the child. The man was caressing a geranium with his long skeleton fingers, and looking down, down, down, as into a bottomless well. He was measuring: I felt it then, I knew it afterward. But the child—ah, the meagre little creature with her blue-white visage and sunken nose! Around the decaying bones of it the lichenous fungus of a rotten birthright! She had crept out upon the doorstep; even to her, who had begun to die before she saw the light, to die long and in much pain and never know aught of life save fugitive yearnings, inexplicable, ending in nothing, buds that can never fruit nor bloom—even to her the mocking sunlight called, and in the wasted little bosom the fading life swelled vaguely. Her crippled leg, shapeless and fleshless, just a covered bone, hung down from the step, and in her crippled arm she nursed a great wax doll, moving the other arm aimlessly to and fro as if seeking relief from pain. At times she pressed her face against the doll—the only thing in all this great surging world on which she might dare to spend her hungry love; only there, on the insensate wax, the innocent love of a child might pour itself through the leprous lips whose pure kiss would curse responsive flesh with that undying death of hers.
And the great hammer that beat in my head, the merciless hammer that rang like iron, began to clang: “And the sins … of the fathers … shall be visited … upon the children … unto the third … and the fourth … generation … And the sins … of the fathers. …”
I pressed my ears between my hands, but the hammer clanged on—“unto the third … and the fourth … generation. …”
Oh the terrible isolation of the child, that pallid mystery of purity enclosed within a cell of purification, that luminous chrysalid sublimely silent, expectant, awaiting its mutation, while the never to be unfolded wings are being eaten away; and no living thing dare press the seal of welcome even on that translucent forehead for the foul contamination that lies therein! “For the sins … of the fathers …”
Under the hammer-clang repeating the pitiless law, my head reeled to and fro: “Oh Life, Life, where will you make it up to her? Why was the dream of justice ever born in the human mind, if it must stand dumb before this terrible child?”
And far away there stretched before my eyes the limitless procession of little lives that had come forth in waste and blight, to die in their smitten youth, bearing through all their pain in the unnameable grace of babyhood, the aroma of green tendrils, the gloss and the down of childhood shining and floating still among the dust and death. Oh, that girl’s long golden hair! How thick and fair it gleams around the waxy face! And the little starved kitten in the alleyway with its delicate paws catching at a windblown straw! God? Did men ever believe a God could so order life? Did anyone ever believe it?
I stared up at the sky, and the face of the consumptive caressing his geranium came in between. Ah, well, he and I at least had lived a little; but the mother of the doll had never lived; she had died always.
We have gone from each other now. Somehow the door of my coffin reopened, and I came back to the living. The man passed down to the dead. Of his will he went. It happened so: on a day of thunder and storm he leaned out and measured with his eyes for the last time; then he looked back into the room; no one was there. He set the geranium carefully at the side of the windowsill, and plunged to the stone below—the kind, hard stone that was merciful to him.
The child remains. In the summer days she still sits there upon the step—her sullen eyes staring with a seeing blindness at what she does not understand, sometimes the skull-like face bending to kiss the only thing that does not shun her love—the Doll.
If her father and mother live they never face that sight. Stranger hands attend her, professional hands, sterilized hands. They do their duty, kindly; but never the warmth of all-oblivious love, careless of contamination, enfolds her to a living breast, kisses through the clay to the spirit. Locked within the fatal narrowing circle, her soul is freezing while her body rots. Powerless in its martyrdom it waits the final expiation, hidden and dark, like an eye seen dull-blue under a lid that has never unclosed. Powerless, non-understanding. … —“For the sin … of the father … has been visited … upon the child. …” And there is no Justice anywhere, not anywhere.