The Shoulders of Atlas. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
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 laid away without a back breadth to her dress.”
With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the parlor. She closed the door behind her. When she came out a few minutes later she was pale but triumphant. “There,” said she, “it's back with her, and I've got just this much to say, and no more, Flora Barnes. When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you've got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel the Ladies' Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next week, and don't you ever touch a back breadth again, or I'll tell it right and left, and you'll see how much business you'll have left here, I don't care how sickly it gets.”
“If father would—only have joined the trust I never would have thought of such a thing, anyway,” muttered Flora. She was vanquished.
“You do it, Flora Barnes.”
“Yes, I will. Don't speak so, Mrs. Whitman.”
“You had better.”
The undertaker and his son-in-law and Henry had remained quite silent. Now they moved toward the door, and Flora followed, red and perspiring. Sylvia heard her say something to her father about the trust on the way to the gate, between the tall borders of box, and heard Martin's surly growl in response.
“Laying it onto the trust,” Sylvia said to Henry—“such an awful thing as that!”
Henry assented. He looked aghast at the whole affair. He seemed to catch a glimpse of dreadful depths of feminity which daunted his masculine mind. “To think of women caring enough about dress to do such a thing as that!” he said to himself. He glanced at Sylvia, and she, as a woman, seemed entirely beyond his comprehension.
The whole great house was sweet with flowers. Neighbors had sent the early spring flowers from their door-yards, and Henry and Sylvia had bought a magnificent wreath of white roses and carnations and smilax. They had ordered it from a florist in Alford, and it seemed to them something stupendous—as if in some way it must please even the dead woman herself to have her casket so graced.
“When folks know, they won't think we didn't do all we could,” Sylvia whispered to Henry, significantly. He nodded. Both were very busy, even with assistance from the neighbors, and a woman who worked out by the day, in preparing the house for the funeral. Everything had to be swept and cleaned and dusted.
When the hour came, and the people began to gather, the house was veritably set in order and burnished. Sylvia, in the parlor with the chief mourners, glanced about, and eyed the smooth lap of her new black gown with a certain complacency which she could not control. After the funeral was over, and the distant relatives and neighbors who had assisted had eaten a cold supper and departed, and she and Henry were alone in the great house, she said, and he agreed, that everything had gone off beautifully. “Just as she would have wished it if she could have been here and ordered it herself,” said Sylvia.
They were both hesitating whether to remain in the house that night or go home. Finally they went home. There was an awe and strangeness over them; besides, they began to wonder if people might not think it odd for them to stay there before the will was read, since they could not be supposed to know it all belonged to them.
It was about two weeks before they were regularly established in the great house, and Horace Allen, the high-school teacher, was expected the next day but one. Henry had pottered about the place, and attended to some ploughing on the famous White grass-land, which was supposed to produce more hay than any piece of land of its size in the county. Henry had been fired with ambition to produce more than ever before, but that day his spirit had seemed to fail him. He sat about gloomily all the afternoon; then he went down for the evening mail, and brought home no letters, but the local paper. Sylvia was preparing supper in the large, clean kitchen. She had been looking over her new treasures all day, and she was radiant. She chattered to her husband like a school-girl.
“Oh, Henry,” said she, “you don't know what we've got! I never dreamed poor Abrahama had such beautiful things. I have been up in the garret looking over things, and there's one chest up there packed with the most elegant clothes. I never saw such dresses in my life.”
Henry looked at his wife with eyes which loved her face,