Chapter I

Old Thomas Featherstone was dead: he was also buried.

The knot of frowsy females--that strange and ghoulish sisterhood which frequents such dismal spots as faithfully as dramatic critics the first nights of theatres--who stood monotonously rocking perambulators on their back wheels outside the cemetery gates, were unanimously of opinion that it had been a skinny show. Indeed, Mrs. Wilkins, who was by way of considering herself what reporters like to call the “doyenne” of the gathering, said as much by way of consolation to her special crony Mrs. Pettefer, coming up hot and breathless, five minutes too late for the afternoon’s entertainment.

“No flars” (thus Mrs. Wilkins), “not one! Not so much as a w’ite chrysant’! You ’aven’t missed much, me dear, I tell you.”

Mrs. Pettefer, her hand to her heaving bosom, said there was some called it waste, to be sure, but she did like to see flars ’erself.

“You’d otter’ave seen ’em when they buried the lickle girl yesterday,” pursued Mrs. Wilkins.

“I _was_ put out, missin’ that, but there, I ’ad to take ar Florence to the ’orspittle for ’er aneroids,” sighed Mrs. Pettefer, glancing malevolently at “ar Florence” as if she would gladly have buried her, without flars, too, by way of paying her out. “I do love a lickle child’s fruneral.”

“Mask o’ flars, the corfin was,” went on Mrs. Wilkins. “The harum lilies was lovely. And one big reaf like an ’arp. W’ite ribbinks on the ’orses, an’ all....”

The connoisseurs in grief dispersed. The driver of the hearse replaced the black gloves of ceremony by the woollen ones of comfort, for the day was raw and promised fog later: pulled out a short clay and lit it, climbed to his box and, whipping up his horses (bays with black points--“none of your damned prancing Belgians for me,” had been one of Old Featherstone’s last injunctions), set off at a brisk trot, he to tea and onions over the stables, they to the pleasant warmth of their stalls and their waiting oats and hay. Four of old Thomas’s nearest relatives piled into the first carriage, four more of his remoter kindred into the second, and the lawyer--Hobbs, Senior, of Hobbs, Keating & Hobbs, of Chancery Lane--who had lingered behind to settle accounts with the officiating clergyman, came hurrying down the path between ranks of tombstones, glimmering pale and ghostly in the greying November afternoon, to make up a mixed bag in the third and last with Captain David Broughton, master of the deceased’s ship “Maid of Athens,” and Mr. Jenkinson, the managing clerk from the office in Billiter Square.

The lawyer was a small, spare man, halting a little from sciatica. Given a pepper-and-salt coat with wide tails, and a straw in his mouth, he would have filled the part of a racing tipster to perfection; but in his sombre funeral array, with his knowing, birdlike way of holding his head, and his sharp, darting, observant glance, he resembled nothing so much as a lame starling; and he chattered like a starling, too, as the carriage rattled away in the wake of the others through the darkening streets towards the respectable northern suburb where old Featherstone had lived and died.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, gentlemen,” he said, settling himself in his place as the coachman slammed the door on the party. “Well, well ... everything’s passed off very nicely, don’t you think?”

Both Captain Broughton and Mr. Jenkinson, after due consideration, agreed that “it” had passed off very nicely indeed; though, to be sure, it would be hard to say precisely what conceivable circumstance might have occurred to make it do otherwise.

Little Jenkinson sat with his back to the horses. He was the kind of person who sits with his back to the horses all through life: the kind of neat, punctual little man to be found in its thousands in the business offices of the City. He carried, as it were, a perpetual pen behind his ear. A clerk to his finger-tips--say that of him, and you have said all; unless perhaps that in private life he was very likely a bit of a domestic tyrant in some brick box of a semi-detached villa Tooting or Balham way, who ran his finger along the sideboard every morning to see if his wife had dusted it properly.

Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals--that indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands, cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white split across the knuckles, lay awkwardly, palms uppermost, on his knees. “Damn the things,” he said to himself for the fiftieth time, contemplating their empty finger-tips, sticking out flat as the ends of half-filled pea-pods, “why don’t they make ’em so that a man can get his hands into ’em?”

A square-set man, a shade under medium height, with a neat beard, once fair, now faded to a sandy grey, and eyes of the clear ice-blue which suggested a Scandinavian ancestry, he carried his sixty-odd years well. A typical shipmaster, one would say at a first glance: a steady man, a safe man, from whom nothing unexpected need be looked for, one way or the other. And then, perhaps, those ice-blue eyes would give you pause, and the thought would cross your mind that there might be certain circumstances in which the owner of those eyes might conceivably become no longer a safe and steady quantity, but an unknown and even an uncomfortable one.

“Don’t mind admitting I’m glad it’s over,” rattled on the little lawyer; “depressing affairs, these funerals, to my thinking. Horrible. Good for business, though--our business and doctors’ business, what! More people get their death through attendin’ other people’s funerals than one likes to think of. It’s the standing, you know. That’s what does it. Standing on damp ground. Nothing worse--nothing! And then no hats. That’s where our friends the Jews have the pull of us Gentiles--eh, Mr. Jenkinson? If a Jew wants to show respect, he keeps his hat on. Curious, ain’t it? Ever hear the story about the feller--Spurgeon, was it--or Dr. Parker--Spurgeon, I think--one or t’other of ’em, anyway, don’t much matter, really--and the two fellers that kept their hats on while he was preachin’? ‘If I were to go to a synagogue,’ says Spurgeon--yes, I’m pretty sure it was Spurgeon--‘if I went to a synagogue,’ says he, ‘I should keep my hat on; and therefore I should be glad if those two young Jews in the back of the church would take theirs off in _my_ synagogue’--ha ha ha--good, wasn’t it?...

“And talking about getting cold at funerals, I’ll let you into a little secret. I always wear an extra singlet, myself, for funerals. Yes; and a body belt. Got ’em on now. Fact. My wife laughs at me. But I say, ‘Oh, you may laugh, my dear, but you’d laugh the other side of your face if I came home with lumbago and you had to sit up half the night ironing my back.’ Ever try that for lumbago? A common flat iron--_you_ know. Hot as you can bear it. Best thing going--ab-so-lutely....”

He paused while he rubbed a clear place in the windows which their breath had misted and peered out like a child going to a party.

“Nearly there, I think,” he went on. “Between ourselves, I think the old gentleman’s going to cut up remarkably well. Six figures, I shouldn’t wonder. Not a bit, I shouldn’t.... A shrewd man, Captain Broughton, don’t you agree?”

Captain Broughton in his dark corner made a vague noise which might be taken to indicate that he did agree. Not that it mattered, really, whether he agreed or not. The little lawyer was one of those people who was so fond of hearing his own voice that he never even noticed if anyone was listening to him; which was all to the good when you were feverishly busy with your own thoughts.

“Ah, yes,” he resumed, “a very shrewd, capable man of business! Saw the way things were going in the shipping world and got out in time. ‘The sailing ship is done’ (those were his very words to me). ‘If I’d been thirty years younger I’d have started a fleet of steam kettles with the best of ’em. But not now--not at my time of life. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ Those were his very words....

“Ah, ha, here we are at last! Between ourselves, a glass o’ the old gentleman’s port won’t come amiss. Fine cellar he kept--fine cellar! ‘I don’t go in for a lot of show, Hobbs,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but I like what I have _good_....’”