The Whirligig of Time

by Wayland Wells Williams

Presently James wandered into the bedroom that had once been hers. He turned on all the lights as if in the hope that illuminating the places she had been familiar with would bring the memory of her more sharply to his mind. Yes, it all seemed very natural; he would not say but what it made death less terrible. The fact that her chair was in its accustomed place before her dressing table did somehow make it easier to remember the events of that afternoon. He sat down before the dressing table. There was little on it to bring an intimate recollection of her to his mind; most of her small possessions she had naturally taken away with her to Bar Harbor. He opened a drawer and discovered nothing but a small box of hairpins.

He took them out and handled them gently for a moment. Hairpins! Even so, they brought her back more vividly than anything had yet done—the soft dark hair sweeping back from the forehead, the lovely arch of her nose, and all the rest of it.... He supposed she ought to seem aloof and unapproachable, now that she was dead, but it was not so at all. He remembered her only as feminine and appealing. She certainly had been very beautiful. And of all that beauty there remained only—hairpins. The fact of human mortality pressed suddenly down on him. Some time, a few days or a few decades hence, he would cease to exist, even as Beatrice, and nothing would remain of him but—Not hairpins, indeed, but hardly anything more substantial. A society pin, a little gold football, a few papers bearing his signatures in McClellan's files....

Poor Beatrice!

A feeling touched his heart at last; one of pity. Poor Beatrice! Fate had treated her harshly, far beneath her deserts. She had sinned.... Had she? It was not for him to settle that; she had been human, even as he. She had been frail; leave it at that. The strongest of us are weak at times. Only most of us are given a chance to regain our strength, pull ourselves together after a fall, make something out of ourselves at last. This opportunity had been denied Beatrice. Surely it was hard that she should be cut off thus in the depth of her frailty, at the lowest ebb of all that was good in her. The weakest deserved better than that.

So he sat meditating on the tragedy of her life as he might, in an idle mood, have brooded over the story of a lovely and unhappy queen of long ago, some appealing, wistful figure of the past with whom he had nothing in common but mortality. The sense of his own detachment from the story of his wife's life struck him at last and roused him to fresh pity. He went into his dressing room and fetched the photograph of her that he had thought it advisable to keep on his bureau. He stood it up on her dressing table and sat down again to study it. Poor Beatrice! It was pathetic that she, so young, so beautiful, so lonely, should be unmourned, since his feeling could not properly be described as mourning....

"Poor Beatrice," he murmured, "is pity all I can feel for you?"

A bell sounded somewhere, the front door bell. He scarcely noticed it.

No, there was one person to mourn her, of course—Tommy. The thought of him sent a sudden shudder through him. Tommy! He wondered if he could bring himself to be decent to Tommy in case he should turn up.... Just like him, the nauseous little brute!

No, that thought was unworthy of him. What particular grudge had he against Tommy? Hitherto he had not even taken the trouble to despise Tommy, and surely there was no point in beginning now. No, he must be decent to Tommy, if the occasion should arise.

But that Tommy should be chief mourner! Poor Beatrice!...