It was a little girl.

It had been swaddled up, but in rags so scanty that in its struggles it

had freed itself from its tatters. Under it its attenuated limbs, and

above it its breath, had somewhat melted the snow. A nurse would have

said that it was five or six months old, but perhaps it might be a year,

for growth, in poverty, suffers heart-breaking reductions which

sometimes even produce rachitis. When its face was exposed to the air it

gave a cry, the continuation of its sobs of distress. For the mother not

to have heard that sob, proved her irrevocably dead.

The child took the infant in his arms. The stiffened body of the mother

was a fearful sight; a spectral light proceeded from her face. The

mouth, apart and without breath, seemed to form in the indistinct

language of shadows her answer to the questions put to the dead by the

invisible. The ghastly reflection of the icy plains was on that

countenance. There was the youthful forehead under the brown hair, the

almost indignant knitting of the eyebrows, the pinched nostrils, the

closed eyelids, the lashes glued together by the rime, and from the

corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth a deep channel of tears.

The snow lighted up the corpse. Winter and the tomb are not adverse. The

corpse is the icicle of man. The nakedness of her breasts was pathetic.

They had fulfilled their purpose. On them was a sublime blight of the

life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and

maternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity. At the point of

one of the nipples was a white pearl. It was a drop of milk frozen.

227

The Man Who Laughs