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Crane and Crew

"You are not really dying, are you?" Samuel asked, paying no attention to Crane.

"I don't know about it being serious." Feather said.

"Death is always serious!" Samuel said.

"I never said I was going to die. I am presumably going to leave off being Feather, but I shall go on being something. Another animal, I suppose. You see, when one hasn't been very good in the life one has just lived, one reincarnates in some lower organism. And I haven't been very good, when one comes to think of it. I've been silly and stupid and immature and all that sort of thing when circumstances have seemed to warrant it."

"Circumstances never warrant that sort of thing." Samuel hastily said.

"If you don't mind my saying so," Feather observed, "Egbert is a circumstance that would warrant any amount of that sort of thing. He's your dad--that's different; you're bound by a love stronger then a friendship, even a marriage. You could fight, and the next day, it's all well. I'm an orphan."

"I don't see what's wrong with Egbert!" Samuel protested.

"Oh, the wrongness has been on my part," Feather admitted dispassionately. "Egbert has merely been the extenuating circumstance. He made a peevish kind of fuss, for instance, when I took the collie puppies from the farm out for a run when I first met him. They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex, running all over the flower beds. You know how devoted he is to his poultry and garden."

"And we thought it was an accident!" Samuel exclaimed.

"You see," Feather resumed. "I really have some grounds for supposing that my next incarnation will be in a lower organism. I shall be an animal like I am now, but a normal one, of some kind. I think I may count on being a nice animal, something elegant and lively, with a love of fun. An otter, perhaps."

"I can't imagine you as an otter." Samuel said.

"Well, I don't suppose you can imagine me as an angel, if it comes to that." Feather said.

Samuel was silent. He couldn't. He couldn't imagine anyone that way.

"Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable." Feather continued. "Salmon to eat all the year round."

"Think of the otter hounds!" Samuel exclaimed. "How dreadful to be hunted and harried and finally worried to death!"

"Rather fun with half the neighborhood looking on, and anyhow better than now, lying on the ground, dying. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into a mythical orangutan form, I should think."

"I wish you would be serious." Samuel sighed. "You really ought to be if you're not going survive the journey to town."

And that is when Feather died. That moment. Samuel said nothing, paralyzed by grief.

Hours later

"What's this?" Samuel asked.

"My uncle's home town." Crane explained. "You should find life here better after what happened."

Samuel nodded. "Feather had the maddest idea. She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter."

"One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently." Crane said. "One can hardly set them down as being mad."

"You think she really might have passed into some other form?" Samuel asked.

"Definitely." Crane said. "And it's best for you to think that."

You could say Samuel had a chance to start fresh in this new town. So did Crane. Somehow, Feather's death freed him. Freed him of Basil. Freed him of his voice. Freed him of who he didn't want to be. Freed him of his past. Freed him completely.

Freed him.