This set her to thinking. What if one made an end?
She went out one cold, gray afternoon in the thick of a snow-storm and wandered up and down the railroad. It was easy walking upon the sleepers, the place was lonely, and she had come out to be alone. She liked the beat of the storm in her face for a while, the sharp turns of the wind, and the soft touch of the snow that was drifting in little heaps about her feet. Then she remembered of how small use it was to like anything in the world now, and her face grew as wild as the storm.
Fancy yourself hemmed in with your direst grief by a drifting sleet in such a voiceless, viewless place as that corpse-like track,—the endless, painless track, stretching away in the white mystery, at peace, like all dead things.
What Sharley should have done was to go home as straight as she could go, put on dry stockings, and get her supper. What she did was to linger, as all people linger, in the luxury of their first wretchedness,—till the uncanny twilight fell and shrouded her in. Then a thought struck her.
A freight-train was just coming in, slowly but heavily. Sharley, as she stepped aside to let it pass, fixed her eyes upon it for a moment, then, with a little hesitation, stopped to pick up a bit of iron that lay at her feet,—a round, firm rod-end,—and placed it diagonally upon the rail. The cars rumbled by and over it. Sharley bent to see. It was crushed to a shapeless twist. Her face whitened. She sat down and shivered a little. But she did not go home. The Evening Accommodation was due now in about ten minutes.
Girls, if you think I am telling a bit of sensational fiction, I wish you would let me know.
"It would be quick and easy," thought Sharley. The man of whom she had read in the Journal last night,—they said he must have found it all over in an instant. An instant was a very short time! And forty years,—and the little black silk apron,—and the cards laid up on a shelf! O, to go out of life,—anywhere, anyhow, out of life! No, the Sixth Commandment had nothing to do with ending one's self!
An unearthly, echoing shriek broke through the noise of the storm,—nothing is more unearthly than a locomotive in a storm. Sharley stood up,—sat down again. A red glare struck the white mist, broadened, brightened, grew.
Sharley laid her head down with her small neck upon the rail, and—I am compelled to say that she took it up again faster than she laid it down. Took it up, writhed off the track, tumbled down the banking, hid her face in a drift, and crouched there with the cold drops on her face till the hideous, tempting thing shot by.
"I guess con-sumption would be—a—little better!" she decided, crawling to her feet.