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?"