Frontier boarding-house life mixed loud cheer with unremarked death
Evidence
All this time the seven or eight people in the room in which I was were talking, laughing, and playing backgammon, and none laughed louder than the landlady, who was sitting where she saw that mysterious door as plainly as I did. All this time, and during the movings in the room, I saw two large white feet sticking up at the end of the bed. I watched and watched, hoping those feet would move, but they did not; and somehow, to my thinking, they grew stiffer and whiter, and then my horrible suspicion deepened, that while we were sitting there a human spirit untended and desolate had passed forth into the night. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 172
Categorization
- SHARE: A death unnoticed mid-backgammon is exactly the kind of macabre anecdote to send to someone who reads frontier memoirs.
- STORYSTEM: A narrator slowly decoding, from two motionless white feet, that a stranger is dying behind a half-closed door while a party continues is a ready-made scene of delayed recognition and complicity.
- XREF: connects to: Frontier boardinghouse life treated a corpse as ordinary furniture, to children’s and boarders’ alarm. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 173
Broader Connections
- Frontier boardinghouse life treated a corpse as ordinary furniture, to children’s and boarders’ alarm.
#corroborates(0.85) — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 173