“We can send a rig to the station,” said the clerk.
“No, thank you,” said the young man.
He looked at the rooms. In the large one he set two chairs six feet apart, facing. Then lighting all the gas, he went out, locked the door, and carried the key away in his pocket.
One hour later an undertaker’s wagon, followed by a hack, pulled up in front of Lycoming House. The young man got out of the hack and stood in the main doorway waiting. Four men drew the pine box out of the wagon, shouldered it, and started in.
There was a crash from end to end of the long front veranda overhanging the street, as twenty men sitting there in tilted chairs, their feet on the railing, smoking, all with one impulse dropped their legs and sat up straight to look. A rigid hotel custom forbids hospitality to Mr. Death. There is only one way for a corpse to pass through a hotel door. That is out. If you die inside that can’t be helped. You must go out. But if you die outside you can’t come in.
The clerk ran out to defend the threshold.
“What’s this?” he shouted. “You can’t do this. You can’t rent a mortuary chapel in a hotel.”
His words were futile. The young man turned his back, beckoned the undertaker to follow, and led the way through the door and down the hall to the big parlor room, the door of which he unlocked and threw open. They put the pine box on the floor, opened it, raised the coffin to rest on the chairs. The young man followed the empty box to the street and returned with two high candlesticks and candles. These he set at the head of the coffin and lighted. Then, locking the door behind him, he joined the undertaker outside and drove away with him.
The clerk, outraged in both his authority and his traditions, meanwhile had fallen downstairs and was shaking a red, tissue-logged hulk that dozed in a hickory chair at the end of the bar. This was Thaddeus Crawford, the proprietor. He never opened his eyes but to eat and speak and look at the books. The sign he gave of listening, or of waking when addressed, was to open his mouth,—a small, cherubic orifice,—and roll the tip of his tongue round and round it. When he closed his mouth that was a sign he was no longer interested. When he opened his eyes and spoke it was a shock to discover that he could speak distinctly, that his senses were alert, that the triumph of matter was incomplete.
During the clerk’s recital of what was taking place upstairs he rolled his tongue excitedly without opening his eyes. Then he heaved himself, achieved locomotion, and went up to look at the names on the register. He looked at them hard and long, dozed a bit, looked at them again, then returned inarticulate to the hickory chair downstairs and fell into it panting.