William Rudd ought to have known better. In a town where funerals were social events dangerously near to diversion, he had been unusually frequent at them. For he belonged to the local chapter of the Knights of Pythias, and when a fellow-member in good standing was forced to resign, William Rudd donned his black suit, his odd-looking cocked hat with the plume, and the anachronous sword, which he carried as one would expect a shoe clerk to carry a sword. The man in the hearse ahead went to no further funerals, stopped paying his dues, made no more noise at the bowling-alley, and ceased to dent his pew cushion. Somebody got his job at once and, after a decent time, somebody else probably got his wife. The man became a remembrance, if that.
Rudd had long realized that people eventually become dead; but he had never realized death. He had been an oblivious child when his mother and father had taken the long trip whose tickets read but one way, and had left him to the grudging care of an uncle with a large enough family.
And now his own family was obliterated. He was again a single man, that familiar thing called a widower. He could not accept it as a fact. He denied his eyes. He was as incredulous as a man who sees a magician play some old vanishing trick. He had seen it, but he could not understand it enough to believe it. When the hack left him at his house he found it emptier than he could have imagined a house could be. Marthy was not on the porch, or in the settin'-room, the dinin'-room, the kitchen, or anywhere up-stairs. The bed was empty, the stove cold. The lamp had not been filled. The cruse of his life was dry, the silver cord loosened, the pitcher broken at the fountain, the wheel broken at the cistern.
As he stumbled about filling the lamp, and covering his hands with kerosene, he wondered what he should do in those long hours between the closing of the shoe-shop of evenings and its opening of mornings. Men behave differently in this recurring situation. Some take to drink, or return to it. Rudd did not like liquor; at least he did not think he would have liked it if he had ever tasted it. Some take to gambling. Rudd did not know big casino from little, though he had once almost acquired a passion for checkers—the give-away game. Some submerge themselves in money-getting. Rudd would not have given up the serene certainty of his little salary for a speculator's chance to clean up a million, or lose his margin.
If only the child had lived, he should have had an industry, an ambition, a use.
Widowers have occasionally hunted consolation with the same sex that sent them grief. Rudd had never known any woman in town as well as he had known Martha, and it had taken him years to find courage to propose to her. The thought of approaching any other woman with intimate intention gave him an ague sweat.
And how was he to think of taking another wife? Even if he had not been so confounded with grief for his helpmeet as to believe her the only woman on earth for him, how could he have accosted another woman when he had only debts for a dowry?
Death is an expensive thing in every phase. The event that robbed Rudd of his wife, his child, his hope, had taken also his companion, his cook, his chambermaid, his washerwoman, the mender of his things; and in their place had left an appalling monument of bills. The only people he had permitted himself to owe money to were the gruesome committee that brought him his grief; the doctor, the druggist, the casket-maker, the sexton, and the dealer in the unreal estate who sold the tiny lots in the sad little town.
His soul was too bruised to grope its way about, but instinct told him that bills must be paid. Instinct automatically set him to work clearing up his accounts. For their sakes he devoted himself to a stricter economy than ever. He engaged meals at Mrs. Judd's boarding-house. He resolved even to rent his home. But, mercifully, there was no one in town to take the place. In economy's name, too, he put away his pipe—for one horrible evening. The next day he remembered how Marthy had sung out, "Why don't you smoke your pipe any more, Will?" and he had answered: "I'd kind o' got out of the habit, Marthy, but I guess I'll git back in." And Lordy, how she laughed! The laughter of the dead—it made a lonely echo in the house.
Gradually he found, as so many dismal castaways have found, that there is a mystic companionship in that weed which has come out of the vegetable world, as the dog from among the animals, to make fellowship with man. Rudd and his pipe were Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday on the desert island of loneliness. They stared out to sea; and imagined.