Chapter IX: The Dark House

I

AUNT LAURA was waiting for him on the platform. It was a very strange sensation. Always at other times when he had come home from St. Luke’s his mother had met him at North Bromwich, and even now it seemed natural to look for her, to pick out her fragile figure from all the others on the platform, and then to kiss her cool face through her veil. On these occasions neither of them would speak, but he would see her eyes smiling and full of love looking him all over, drowning him in their particular kindness. Aunt Laura was a poor substitute. To-day she was a little more diffuse and emotional than usual, and at the same time curiously kinder. She kissed him—her lips were hot—and he felt that the kiss was really nothing more than an attempt to conceal an entirely different emotion and to hide her eyes. On his cheek her lips trembled. He dared not look at her for he was afraid that in her eyes he would be able to read the worst. It had to be faced. At last he managed to say,

“How is she?”

And above the roar of the station he heard an uncertain voice answer. “She’s very ill, Eddie . . . very ill indeed.”

“Not dead? . . . she’s not dead?”

“No, no. We must all be brave, Eddie.”

“We must all be brave.” . . . He hated to hear her talk like that. What had she to be brave about? It wasn’t her mother who was dying, only her sister. A sister wasn’t like a mother. It was all very well to say these conventional things. He didn’t believe she really meant them. She could cry her eyes out before he’d believe her, however kind she might try to be. It wasn’t any good her trying to be kind now. She hadn’t been kind to his mother. He remembered the day when her callousness had made his mother cry. He couldn’t pity her now; he couldn’t put up with her condolences; he believed he hated her. He would hate any one in the world who had given his mother a moment’s pain. She was so little and beautiful and perfect. . . .

And yet, when he sat opposite to Aunt Laura in the Halesby train, and examined her more closely, he could see for himself that the strain of the last few days had somehow chastened her—she seemed to have lost some of her florid assurance, and her eyes looked as if she had been crying. She even seemed to have shrunk a little. And this made matters worse, for it seemed to him that the very thing which had obliterated what he most disliked in her had also accentuated the family likeness. All the time, beneath this face, which he distrusted, he could see a faint and tantalising resemblance to the other face that he adored. If any one had suggested to him that Aunt Laura was in any way like his mother, he would have denied it indignantly; but the likeness was there, a curious, torturing likeness of feature. He didn’t know then what in after years he was to realise time after time: that grief has a way of suppressing individual characteristics and reducing the faces of a whole suffering family to their original type after the manner of a composite photograph. It was tantalising, and so harrowing that he dared not look at her any longer.

At Halesby they walked up from the station together almost without speaking. The little house on the edge of the country wore a strangely tragic air. Downstairs all was quiet. After the big echoing rooms at St. Luke’s it seemed ridiculously small. Nobody inhabited the rooms, and the soft carpet created a curious hushed atmosphere in which it seemed sacrilege to speak in anything but a whisper. Aunt Laura took off her hat and veil.

“I’d better carry my bag upstairs,” said Edwin. He felt somehow, that in his little old room he could be happier. He could even, if he wanted to, throw himself on the bed and give way to the tears which were bound to come.

“No . . . you’d better wait here,” said Aunt Laura. “Your father is sleeping in your room. You see it wouldn’t do for him to be in hers. He’s been there for three nights. And I’m in the spare room. I think you’re going to sleep over at Mrs. Barrow’s.”

Edwin flamed with jealousy. What was Aunt Laura doing in the house? She, above all people, had no right to be there.

“But I could sleep on the sofa in the drawing-room,” he said.

“You mustn’t make difficulties, Eddie. It’s all arranged. The specialist has been out this afternoon to see her with Dr. Moorhouse. He may be upstairs now.”

“But I can’t, I can’t be so far away. I ought to be here. She would like me to be here.”

“Eddie, dear . . . do be a good boy. Here comes your father.”

And his father came. Strangely, strangely old and worn he looked in the shabby alpaca coat. Edwin had never realised that he could be so pathetic. He smiled at Edwin, a smile that was unutterably painful. “Eddie . . . my boy,” he said, and kissed him, “I’m glad you’ve come. . . . She was anxious for you to come. . . .”

“Oh, father. . . .”

“We must all be brave, Eddie.” Again that terrible smile.

“Father, may I go and see her . . .?”

“The doctor says that nobody had better see her to-night.”

“Yes, Eddie, we must obey the doctor’s orders, dear,” said Aunt Laura.

“But you’ve seen her . . . you saw her this morning, didn’t you?”

“That was different,” said Aunt Laura. “I was up all night with her.”

“It isn’t different, is it, father? Aunt Laura’s nothing to her. . . .”

“Eddie, Eddie. . . .” Aunt Laura protested.

“Father, if she asked for me she ought to see me. . .”

“She’s so ill, Eddie. I’m afraid she wouldn’t know you.”

“Oh, I’m sure she would. . . .”

“Edwin, you mustn’t worry your father; there’s a good boy.”

“Oh, Aunt Laura . . .” Then fiercely, “She’s any mother. . . .”

Edwin’s father sighed and looked away. Aunt Laura, with a business-like change of tone which implied that Edwin’s question was disposed of, whispered to his father, “Is she still sleeping?”

“Yes. . . . The doctor says it isn’t really sleep, it’s coma.”

Coma . . . a gloomy and terrible word! What did it mean? Edwin remembered the woman in the train. “Most of them pass away in their sleep like.”

“I think I’ll go and lie down for an hour,” said his father.

“Yes, do, John,” said Aunt Laura encouragingly. “You need it. I’ll go upstairs myself to be handy if the nurse wants anything.”

This was the first that Edwin had heard of a nurse. The idea inspired him with awe. His father sighed and turned to go.

“Father . . . can’t I go up, only for a minute?”

Aunt Laura, who had taken upon herself the role of protectress and manager of the distressed household, intervened,

“Eddie, you mustn’t worry your father. We’re all in trouble, and you mustn’t be a nuisance.” His father went, without speaking.

“Well, when can I see her?” Edwin demanded.

“To-morrow. . . . You must be patient like the rest of us. Now I must go upstairs. You’ll be quiet, won’t you? Mrs. Barrow has your bedroom ready, and if you take your bag over she’ll give you some tea. She promised to look after you. She was most kind. Or, if you like, and will keep very quiet, you can stay here and read.”

“I didn’t come home to sit down here and read. Why did they send for me to come if they won’t let me see her? I want her. . . .”

“Hush . . .” said Aunt Laura, with an air of being scandalised. She left him, closing the door with exaggerated quietness behind her, leaving him alone in the room that had once witnessed so much happiness. He didn’t know what to do. Read? The idea was ridiculous. He looked at the familiar shelves, on which he knew the place and title of every book. A sense of the room’s awful emptiness oppressed him, for everything in it recalled the memory of his darling’s presence; the books that they had read together; the big chair in which he had sat cuddled in her arms; her workbasket on the table by the window; and—terribly pathetic—a shopping list scribbled on the back of an envelope. He couldn’t bear to be alone in the room with so many inanimate reminders; and while he was debating where he should go, a sudden angry jealousy flamed up in his heart towards the other people in the house: his father, Aunt Laura, the doctor, and the unknown nurse who shared the privilege that was denied him and didn’t realise its value. He clenched his hands and cried aloud: “We belong to one another. . . . She’s mine. . . . She’s mine. I hate them.”

He opened the door softly and stepped into the hall. Scarcely knowing what he was doing he looked into the drawing-room. There stood the piano with a sonata of Beethoven upon the music-stand. The room was full of a curious penetrating odour which came, he discovered, from a big vase full of pinks that had faded and gone yellow. Some days ago, he supposed, his mother had picked them. Her hands . . . he worshipped her hands. A strange and uncontrollable impulse made him bend and kiss the dead flowers.

But the atmosphere of that room was if anything more cruel than the other. He couldn’t stay there. Once more he found himself in the darkness and quiet of the hall. The house had never been so silent. Only, in the corner an oak grandfather’s clock with a brass face engraved with the name of Carver, Hay, ticked steadily. In the silence he heard his own heart beating far faster than the clock.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing he climbed upstairs and crept quietly to the door of the room where his mother was lying. He knelt on the mat outside the door and listened. Inside the room there was no sound; not even a sound of breathing. If only he dared open the door. . . . If only he could see her for a second she might smile at him and he would be satisfied. He was thankful to find that the mere fact of being nearer to her made him feel more happy. For a long time he knelt there, and then, hearing a slight noise in his own room, where his father was supposed to be resting, he stole downstairs again, a little comforted, opened the front door and went out into the garden.

II

Mrs. Barrow, at whose house it had been arranged that Edwin should put up for the night, was the Ingleby’s nearest neighbour and their landlady. The gardens of the two houses stood back to back with a high wall between, and the relations of the neighbours had always been so friendly that the little door in the wall was never locked, even though it was so seldom used that tendrils of ivy had attached themselves to the woodwork, forming a kind of natural hinge.

On the Inglebys’ side of the wall lay a modern well-kept garden, not more than twenty years old. Edwin’s mother had a passion for flowers, and his father had made the gratification of her pleasure his favourite hobby, so that Edwin’s earliest memories of both of them were associated with the gathering of fruits and blooms, with the rich odours of summer, or, above all, the smell of newly-turned earth. This summer Mr. Ingleby had planted the long bed that stretched along the side of the house towards the door in Mrs. Barrow’s wall with masses of delicately-coloured stocks. Though the form of these flowers was not particularly beautiful their scent rose to meet him in a hot wave of overpowering sweetness. He remembered a letter in which his mother had told him how wonderful they were. Everything reminded him of her. . . .

He passed through the door in the wall and entered another world.

Everything connected with Mrs. Barrow was in character. She was a little old woman, the widow of a small manufacturer who had set his mark upon the countryside by the erection of a chimney stack taller than any other in the district, so tall that even from the summit of Pen Beacon it made a landmark more prominent than the slender spire of Halesby church. In Edwin’s eyes its presence was so familiar that he had almost become fond of it. Many and many times on windy days he had watched the immense structure swaying gently as a reed in a summer breeze. Under the shadow of Mr. Barrow’s monument lay an old garden designed on the formal lines of a hundred years ago, full of honeysuckle arbours and narrow twisted paths: so rich, and so tangled that every year a great part of its fruitfulness ran to waste. Long rows of lavender were there; and alleys of hoary apple-trees whose gnarled branches overreached the paths: and the whole place was so crowded with decaying vegetable matter and the mould of fallen leaves that even in high summer it had an autumnal savour and a ripe smell that was not unlike that of an apple loft.

Through this shady precinct he passed carrying his hand-bag, pausing only in a sudden patch of light where a bank of tawny scabious diffused an aromatic perfume in the sun. He paused, not because he was impressed by their garish beauty, but because many of the heads were now frequented by a new hatch of Comma butterflies eagerly expanding their serrated wings, drugged already with the flowers’ harsh honey. Edwin had never seen this uncommon butterfly before. In the neighbourhood of St. Luke’s the species, which is notoriously capricious, had never appeared. He wished that he had a butterfly net with him: for by catching one of them he would have scored over Widdup.

So he passed to Mrs. Barrow’s house, a dark Georgian structure as twisted and autumnal as her garden, and there, in a gloomy sitting-room, he found the old lady herself, a little demure creature with round-hunched, shawl-covered shoulders, like the dormouse in _Alice in Wonderland_, taking tea with her companion, a decorous lady of the same age named Miss Beecock.

They did their best to make Edwin feel at home. They never mentioned his mother, but it was so obvious that their maidenly commonplaces were only designed to divert his mind from the tragic shadow which he carried with him, that Edwin felt inclined to scandalise them by talking of it. . . . Their deliberate awkward kindness, the cautious glances which they exchanged, the little sniff of emotion which Mrs. Barrow concealed in her empty teacup, when the pitiful contemplation of Edwin’s youth and innocence overcame her, would have been amusing if there had been room for anything amusing on the darkened earth.

When they had finished the buttered scones and medlar jelly which Mrs. Barrow made from fruit that fell on the dark leaf-mould of her garden, Mrs. Barrow herself moved with short steps to a mahogany bureau, and calling Edwin to her side, showed him one of those secret drawers whose secret everybody knows, smelling of cedar wood and aged russia leather. From this drawer she produced a purse made of beadwork, and from the purse her fragile fingers extracted a Georgian five-shilling piece, which, with a sigh, she then presented to Edwin. “If I were you,” she said, “I don’t think I should spend it. Old coins like that are valuable. Mr. Barrow had a great interest in anything old and historical.”

Edwin was so surprised by this generosity that he almost forgot to thank her; but Miss Beecock, in a shrill, soft voice, reminded him of his duty, saying: “Now, isn’t that kind of Mrs. Barrow, Edwin?” Edwin hastily agreed that it was, and the old ladies smiled at one another, as though they were saying, “Isn’t that clever of us, to give him a toy that will take his mind off his mother?” In the silence that followed, a canary which had been pecking at a lump of sugar stuck in the bars of his cage, attracted by the bright hues of the ribbon on Mrs. Barrow’s cap, broke into a shrill twitter.

“Sweet . . . swee . . . t,” said Mrs. Barrow with pursed lips.

“Sweet . . . sweet,” echoed Miss Beecock, with a little laugh.

“I think I will take my crochet on to the lawn,” said Mrs. Barrow.

“If you have your shawl, and the grass is not too damp,” Miss Beecock reminded her.

“There was a heavy dew last week,” said Mrs. Barrow. “Which day was it? I think it must have been Tuesday. Yes . . . it was Tuesday. That was the day on which I spoke to Mr. Waldron about thinning the grapes. And now, Edwin, would you like to fetch a book from the drawing-room? You may prefer to bring it out on to the lawn. You know the way. The key is on the outside of the door.”

Edwin said, “Yes.” He left them and climbed the creaking oak stairs, to the first story landing, a wide passage of polished wood lit by a shining fanlight that overlooked the street. He knew the room well enough. It had been one of the delights of his childhood. It was long, and irregular in shape, and crammed with curious things that he had once found entertaining.

He unlocked the door and released immediately a concentrated odour of the same character as that which had issued from the secret drawer in Mrs. Barrow’s bureau. Damp and cedar wood and mouldy russia leather. All the chairs in the room were covered with white draw-sheets as though they were dead and awaiting burial. The venetian blinds were down, and when Edwin raised them, the heavy rep curtains at the side of the three tall windows admitted no more than an ecclesiastical twilight.

There, however, stood the things which had delighted his youth. Nothing had been moved a hair’s-breadth for many years: since the day, indeed, long before Edwin was born, when Mr. Barrow had died. It was the best room of the house: and so reverenced by Mrs. Barrow that she would never have dreamed of living in it or using it at all except on Christmas Day, when a melancholy family party of relatives and possible heirs assembled to do their duty by the old lady. Then, and only then, a fire was lighted, extracting from the walls a curious odour of dry rot, which resembled, curiously enough, the apple-loft odour which pervaded the garden.

Edwin was soon at home. Here was a great glass-fronted mahogany bookcase the wonder of which he had never thoroughly explored. Here was the flat glass showcase, shaped like a card-table in which a number of Mr. Barrow’s curiosities reposed. Here was the great musical-box (glass-topped again) with its prickly brass cylinder and twanging teeth for notes, and a winding lever that made a sound as impressive as the winding of a grandfather’s clock.

Edwin thought he would try a tune. He wound up the mechanism, pressed over the starting lever, and the prickly cylinder began slowly to revolve. It made a bad start; for no one knows how many years ago it had been stopped in the middle of a tune. Then, having finished the broken cadence, it burst gaily into the song called “Mousetraps for Sale,” a pathetic ballad which may have sounded sprightly in the ears of young people fifty years ago, but in this strange room was invested with a pathetic and faded quality which made Edwin wish it would stop. There was no need for him to pull back the lever, for the musical box, as though guessing his wishes, suddenly petered out with a sort of metallic growl. Edwin laughed in spite of himself, at this peculiar noise, and hearing the echo of his own laugh turned to find himself staring into the jealous eyes of a portrait of a Victorian gentleman whom he took to be the late Mr. Barrow, for whose delectation, over his glass of punch, the instrument had been purchased. Edwin began to feel a little uneasy. The feeling annoyed him. “I’m silly to be like this,” he said to himself. “I suppose it’s the uncertainty. . . . Oh, I wish I knew. . . .”

He took refuge in the bookcase, from which he extracted, to his great delight, the complete works of Shenstone in two volumes, bound in slippery calf and published by Dodsley in the year seventeen-seventy. . . . The books were in a beautiful state of preservation. Edwin doubted if they had ever been read. Mr. Barrow, no doubt, had purchased them simply for their local interest. With a final glance at Mr. Barrow’s portrait, in a faint hope that he approved of his choice, Edwin let down the blinds, so that no light penetrated the room but a single gleam reflected from the glass pane of a wool-worked fire-guard that hung from a bracket at the side of the fireplace. With a shiver he re-locked the door. . . .

When he reached the garden with his Shenstone, the light was failing.

“You were a long time, Edwin,” said Mrs. Barrow.

“Yes, wasn’t he?” echoed Miss Beecock. “I’m afraid it is time Mrs. Barrow was going in.”

Quietly, and with a leisure that seemed to presume an endless placidity of existence, the old ladies folded their work, sighed, and recrossed the lawn towards the house. In a little time came supper: biscuits and milk on which a thick cream had been rising all day. Then Mrs. Barrow kissed him good-night. He felt her face on his cheek: a little chilly, but lax and very soft. Miss Beecock lighted him to bed with a candle in a highly-polished brass candlestick. The sheets were cool and of old linen. The bedroom smelt of apples. With the air of “Mousetraps for Sale” in his head, and a sleepy consciousness of ancient creaking timbers, Edwin fell asleep.

He slept long and dreamlessly, waking in the morning to find the sun shining brilliantly through Mrs. Barrow’s lace curtains. At first he could not remember where he was, so completely had sleep, bred of long fatigue, obliterated his consciousness. Before he opened his eyes he had half expected to hear the noise of Widdup turning out of bed with a flop, or the clangour of the six-thirty bell. And then, with a rush, the whole situation came back to him: this was Halesby, and the new day might be full of tragedy.

At his bedside Miss Beecock, who had stolen into the room an hour or so before in slippered feet and found him sleeping, had placed a glass of creamy milk and biscuits. It was awfully kind of her, Edwin thought, as he sipped the yellow cream at the top of the glass. Outside in the garden it was very quiet. He had overslept the morning chorus of birdsong; but he heard the noise of a thrush cracking snail-shells on the gravel path beneath his window. He had forgotten to wind up his watch overnight; and when he found it in his waistcoat pocket where he had left it he saw that it had stopped. “I’d better get up, anyway,” he thought, and while he stood at the door wondering if Mrs. Barrow’s house ran to a bathroom, he heard a clock in the hall give a loud whirr and then strike ten. “Good Lord, I’ve overslept myself,” he thought. “I’d better buck up.”

Abandoning the uncertainty of hunting for a bath he dressed and came downstairs to the sitting-room (that was what it was called) in which the meals had been served the day before. Mrs. Barrow was sitting there in pleasant sunlight, wearing a less elaborate cap and a shetland shawl, and the canary, whose brass cage and saffron plumage now shone brilliantly in the morning sunlight, was singing like mad. When Edwin came into the room she smiled at him.

“We’re so glad that you slept well,” she said. “Miss Beecock went to have a look at you but you were sleeping so soundly that she didn’t like to disturb you. You must have been tired out. Now you’ll be ready for breakfast.”

At this point Miss Beecock entered the room, her attire modified in the same degree as that of Mrs. Barrow.

“Ah . . .” she said with a little laugh. “Here you are. I must ask Annie for your breakfast.”

“He’d like a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, and some buttered toast,” said Mrs. Barrow temptingly.

“Yes, of course he would,” said Miss Beecock.

“I think if you don’t mind,” said Edwin, “I’d like to go home. It’s so late.”

“Oh, you needn’t mind us,” chimed the two old ladies.

That wasn’t exactly what Edwin had meant, but he allowed himself to be persuaded, and even enjoyed his breakfast, to the accompaniment of the twitterings of the canary and his two hostesses.

“You’ll sleep here again to-night, won’t you?” they said when he was ready to go. Edwin thanked them. “Oh, we’re only too pleased to be of any assistance to your mother,” they said, pursuing his departure with the kindest and most innocent of smiles.

This time he did not linger in the old garden: he was far too anxious to get home and learn how things were going. At the door in the wall his heart stood still. What was he going to find? It seemed to him that something terrible might be waiting for him on the other side of the wall. It was a silly apprehension, he thought, and when he stepped into it the new garden was as sunny as the old. Only, on the long walk beside the bed of stocks, a mattress, blankets, and sheets were spread out to air in the sun. The scent of some disinfectant mingled with that of the flowers. His fears supplied an awful explanation. It was the bedding from his mother’s room that was spread out there in the sun. And when he looked up to the windows of the house above him, he saw that the blinds were down. That, of course, needn’t mean anything on the sunny side of the house. In a great hurry he turned the corner to the front and saw that the blinds on that side were down as well.

III

In the darkened dining-room Aunt Laura sat at his mother’s desk writing letters with dashing fluency. When he came in she stopped her writing and rose to meet him. “Edwin, my poor dear,” she said, holding out her hands to him. He took no notice of her hands.

“She’s gone,” he said, “in the night?”

“Yes. . . . In the night. She passed away quite quietly. It’s a dreadful blow for us, Edwin, we must be brave. . . .”

He hadn’t time for sentiments of that kind. “She was alive when I came yesterday. And you wouldn’t let me see her. _You_, of all people. . . . She hated you. She told me so. She always hated you . . . and she’d hate you for this more than anything.”

“Edwin,” she cried, “don’t say these terrible things!’

“They’re true . . . true. I wish it were you who were dead. It was you who stopped me from seeing her . . . my little darling. . . . Damn you . . . damn you.”

“Edwin . . . you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re cruel.”

“Cruel. . . . I like that. Cruel. _You_ talk about cruelty. . . .”

“Edwin. . . .” Aunt Laura clutched nervously at her breast. It was funny to see this big blowzy woman crumple up like that. She flopped down in a red plush chair and started crying softly in a thin voice. Edwin didn’t mind. Let her cry. She deserved it. Nothing of that kind could soften his indignant heart.

“Where’s father?” he asked at last.

“I don’t know. He’s upstairs somewhere,” she said between her sobs. “For goodness’ sake, Edwin, don’t go and say things like this to the poor man. We all have this trouble to bear. And we’ve had the strain of nursing her. Now, don’t be hasty,” she pleaded.

“All right,” said Edwin, and left her.

Upstairs on the landing he found a pale, shadowy figure in which he could scarcely recognise his father. Neither of them could speak at all. Edwin had been ready with the reproaches that had come to his lips in the presence of Aunt Laura; but he couldn’t do it. This man was too broken. He was face to face with a grief as great as his own. There were no words for either of them. The boy and the man clung together in each other’s arms, overcome with pity and with sorrow. On the landing, outside the door of the room where she lay dead, they stood together and cried quietly to each other. And now it seemed to Edwin as if pity for his father were overriding even the intensity of his own grief; for she had been everything to him, too, and for so many years. He felt that he would have done anything in the world to comfort this desolate man, whom he had always taken for granted and never really loved. But his mother had loved him. He wondered if they could do anything to assuage the bitterness of their loss by loving one another. They were two people left alone with nothing else in the world but each other. Why not . . .? That, he thought, was what his mother would have wished.

He felt his father’s tears on his forehead, the roughness of his father’s grey beard. He felt the man’s body quivering with sobs, and the arms which clutched his body as if that were the only loved thing left to him in life. They went together into the little room that had always been Edwin’s, and there they knelt together beside the bed. He didn’t exactly know why they knelt, but kneeling there at his side, with his arm still clasped about his waist, he supposed that his father was praying; and though Edwin could not understand what good prayer could do, it seemed to him a simple and a beautiful thing. It made him feel that he loved his father more than ever. He wished that he could pray himself. He tried to pray . . . for what? There was nothing left in this world for him to pray for. At last his father rose to his feet in the dim room, and Edwin rose with him. He spoke, and the tears still choked his voice and his bearded lip trembled. “Edwin,” he said, “I shall never be able to get over this. I’m broken. . . . My life . . . my life has . . .” He stopped.

“You don’t know what she was to me, Eddie. I can’t realise, Eddie, there are only two of us left. We must help each other to bear it. We must be brave.”

Strange that a phrase which had sounded like cant on the lips of Aunt Laura should now seem the truest and most natural thing imaginable.

“We . . . we were like children together,” said his father.

Again they stood for a little while in silence. At last Edwin, still gripping his father’s arm, said,—“Father, may I see her?”

“Of course, dear. . . .”

They went together to the room, and his father opened the door and pulled up one of the blinds. Mrs. Bagley, the charwoman who did odd work in the house and was an expert in this melancholy office, had drawn a clean white sheet over the bed. His mother lay there in a cotton nightdress with her hands folded in front of her, and her lips gently smiling. Even her cheeks were faintly flushed, but the rest of her face and her hands were of a waxen pallor. She looked very small and childlike. She looked like a small wax doll. In this frail and strangely beautiful creature Edwin could only recognise a shadow of the mother that he knew. It was a little girl that lay there, not his mother.

Edwin spoke in a whisper,—

“Should I kiss her?”

His father nodded and turned away.

But he did not kiss her as he had thought he would. For some reason he dared not, for he could not feel certain that it was she at all. He only touched her hands, the hands that he had always worshipped, with his fingers. They were cold; and still her lips smiled. The room was full of the odour of Sanitas which some one had sprayed or sprinkled over the floor. For the rest of his life the smell was one which Edwin hated; for in his mind it became the smell of death.

IV

On the evening after the funeral Edwin sat alone in the drawing-room. He sat there because the other room was still cumbered with the remnants of a melancholy repast: several leaves of mahogany had been dragged down from the dust of the attic and had lengthened the dining-room table to such an extent that there was scarcely room to move in it, and round this table, in the sunny afternoon, had clustered a large collection of people who smelt of black crape and spoke in lowered, gentle voices, out of respect for the woman whom, it seemed to Edwin, they had never known.

Everybody who entered the house—and there were many, for Mr. Ingleby was much respected in Halesby—wore the same grave air. Even the undertaker, a brisk little man with a fiery red beard and one shoulder lower than the other from the constant carrying of coffins, treated his daily task with the same sort of mute reverence. His face, at any rate, wore an expression that matched that of the mourners; and Edwin was only disillusioned as to the sincerity of his expression when he heard him swearing violently at the driver of the first mourning carriage. This moment of relaxation caused him to forget himself so far as to whistle a pantomime song as he crossed the drive.

The black-coated people in the dining-room did not hear him: they were far too busy being serious: and behind them, from time to time, Edwin could see the grey face of his father, with curiously tired and puzzled eyes. Puzzled . . . that was the only word for them. It was just as if the man were protesting, in all simplicity, against the unreason and injustice of the blow which had fallen on him. Edwin, savagely hating the presence of all these hushed, uninterested people, found in his father’s suffering face a sudden reinforcement to his anger. It was a shame, a damned, ghastly shame, that a simple man like that should be hit in the dark; and even more pathetic that he should be simple enough to take the sympathy of his neighbours at its face value. Edwin glowed with a new and protective love for his father. It was as well that some generous emotion should be born to take the place of his numb grief.

Above all, the sight of his Aunt Laura, who was conscientiously doing the honours of the house, maddened him. He could not look at her without remembering that she had been selfish and unkind to his mother; that, on the very last day, she had robbed him of the privilege of seeing his darling alive. Even now, he believed that she was enjoying herself. Her eyes occasionally brimmed with tears, but that meant nothing. They were such easy tears . . . so different from the terrible tears that had shaken his father’s body on the day of desolation. If only she were dead, he thought, there would be no great loss.

And yet, while he thought of this, he suddenly caught sight of her husband, the little manufacturer whom he had lately begun to know as Uncle Albert, a small man with a shiny bald head and a diffident manner: and in the eyes of Uncle Albert, which were fixed upon his wife, he saw an extraordinary mixture of love and admiration for this shallow, diffuse creature whom he had found himself hating.

“If Aunt Laura were to die,” he thought, “Uncle Albert might very well be like father is to-day. That’s a queer idea. . . .” He was amazed at the complications of human relationships and the potential pain that love brings with it. He thought, “It’s no good thinking about it. . . . I give it up. I don’t really wish she were dead. I only wish . . . that there were no such thing as death. Why does God allow it?” No answer came to him: but in place of an answer another angry impulse. “Curse God,” he thought, meaning the God of Mr. Leeming, the God to whom this queer collection of people were to dedicate his mother’s soul. Another thought followed quickly: “What’s the good of cursing him? He doesn’t exist. If he existed this sort of thing couldn’t happen. . . .”

People were seriously setting themselves to the putting on of black kid gloves that the undertaker had provided. The horses on the gravel drive were getting uneasy and the cab wheels made a grating noise. Heavy steps were heard descending the stairs—awkward steps like those of men moving furniture. Edwin saw that his father had heard too. He was looking towards the closed door of the room. He wanted to go and take his father’s hand and hold it, but the space round the edge of the table was packed with people. Now they had opened the hall door. He dared not look out of the window.

The voice of Aunt Laura, most studiously kind, said to him: “Eddie, you’ll come along with your father and Uncle Albert and me.” He said, “All right.” People at the side of the table made way for him. On his way he found himself abreast of his friend, Miss Beecock. She said nothing, but smiled at him and put her arm on his sleeve. She was wearing black silk mittens, and her eyes were full of tears. That weak, tearful smile nearly did for Edwin.

The first cab was drawn up at the hall door. Edwin scrambled in last. Aunt Laura, with a rustle of black silk, made way for him. She took out her handkerchief, and Edwin was stifled with a wave of scent. He hated scent: but anyway it was better than Sanitas. He saw his father’s puzzled eyes on the other side of the cab . . . so old, so awfully old. Uncle Albert took out his handkerchief, too. Evidently, Edwin thought, it was the correct thing to do. He had misjudged him. Uncle Albert proceeded to blow his nose.

They were driving through the High Street. Aunt Laura noticed that most of the shop shutters were up, and in several cases tradesmen were standing at their shop doors bare-headed as they passed.

“It’s very kind of them . . . very nice to see so much respect, John,” she said to his father. Mr. Ingleby said “Yes,” and Aunt Laura, with a little laugh that was merely a symptom of nervousness, went on: “I expect there’ll be a crowd at the cemetery gate.” This time Mr. Ingleby said nothing and Uncle Albert once more stolidly blew his nose. “Albert, dear, I wish you wouldn’t,” said Aunt Laura. The brakes grated, and the cab stopped with a jerk. “Come along, Edwin, jump out, there’s a good boy,” said Aunt Laura. “You’ll walk with your father.”

He walked with his father. The church was full. His father went with bowed head, seeing nothing; but Edwin was conscious of many faces that he knew. In the middle of the aisle the thought suddenly came to him that these people weren’t really there to do honour to his mother: they were so many that most of them could never have known her: no, they were just curious people who had flocked there to find something sensational in the faces of the mourners. In a dull place like Halesby a funeral, and such an important funeral, was an unusual diversion. And this revelation made him determined that whatever happened he would show no emotion that might tickle the sensations of these ghouls. He only wished to goodness that he could explain the matter to his father so that he too might give them nothing to gloat over.

In the church, where a faint mustiness mingled with the exotic scent of arum lilies that diffused from the heap of wreaths on the coffin, Edwin held himself upright. They sang a hymn: “I heard the voice of Jesus say . . . Come unto me and rest”—the first quatrain in unison, and Edwin sang with them, just as he would have sung in the chapel at St. Luke’s. In the churchyard, when they walked in procession behind the bearers to the grave-side, his eyes were still dry, his lips did not tremble, though Aunt Laura’s scented handkerchief was now drenched with tears, and even Uncle Albert, a virtual outsider, was on the edge of violent emotion.

The burial service was nothing to Edwin. There was no consolation in it nor, to him, the least atom of religious feeling. A mockery, a mockery, a solemn and pretentious mockery. For she was dead . . . she had vanished altogether, and the thing that they were burying with muttered formulas and tears was no more she than the empty parchment of the cocoon is the glowing butterfly. Let them cry their eyes out. That was not grief. Beyond tears. Beyond tears. . . .

With a curious air of relief that was very near to a furtive gaiety, the party drove back and reassembled in the dining-room. All except Mr. Ingleby. “He has gone to his room, poor dear,” said Aunt Laura, with her nervous laugh. “Mrs. Barrow, do have a slice of ginger-cake. Just a little?” Round the long table conversation began to flow, cautiously at first, but with an increasing confidence, when it became clear that it was unattended by any revengeful consequences.

“Didn’t you think it was awfully nice to see the people in High Street so respectful, Mrs. Willis?” said Aunt Laura. Edwin looked up. This then was the Mrs. Willis of Mawne Hall with whom his mother had planned the visit to Switzerland. He saw a middle-aged woman in black satin, with a gold watch-chain round her neck and jet in her bonnet. She caught his interested eyes and in return smiled. Aunt Laura went unanswered. “I wonder,” Edwin thought, “if she understands what a fraud the whole thing is.” At any rate she looked kind . . . and she had been kind to his mother too. A moment later she said good-bye, and when Aunt Laura had escorted her to the door, for Mrs. Willis was a person of consequence, the rest of the company began to disappear. At last Edwin was left alone in the room with his aunt and uncle. Aunt Laura’s face, that had been glowing with hospitable smiles, now took a more serious cast.

“Edwin,” she said, “I want to speak to you.”

“Do you?” said Edwin. “Well . . . go on.”

“It’s very painful . . . I’m afraid . . . I’m half afraid that it will have upset your father, poor man—as if he hadn’t enough to put up with.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“How can you ask? I mean your behaviour to-day. In the church. In the cemetery. You stood there just as if . . . just as if . . . oh, it was most irreverent. Not a sign of grief! You must have noticed it, Albert?”

Uncle Albert, most uncomfortable at his inclusion in this family scene, but fully aware of the disaster which would follow denial, said, “Yes . . . yes . . . yes, certainly.”

“Every one must have noticed it,” Aunt Laura went on. “It was a public scandal. It was unnatural. It showed such a curious lack of feeling.”

“Feeling,” said Edwin. “What do you know about feeling?”

“Steady, Edwin, steady,” from Uncle Albert.

“If mother were here,” he said, “and could hear you talking this damned piffle she’d laugh at you. That’s what she’d do.”

“Edwin!”

“It’s true. . . . She couldn’t stick your sort of grief at any price.”

“On the very day of her burial. . . .”

“She’s not buried. It wasn’t she you buried. Oh, I’m sick of you. . . .”

“Edwin . . .” said Uncle Albert, who felt that something in the way of protection was demanded of him. “Really now . . .”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, uncle,” said Edwin.

“You cruel boy,” Aunt Laura sobbed.

He left them there. He carried his bitterness into the drawing-room on the other side of the passage. . . . It was very quiet there. Through the bow window floated the perfume of the bed of stocks. In the corner stood the piano. He had often listened to his mother playing at night when he was in bed. He loved her to play him to sleep. The piano was shut; and the shut piano seemed to him symbolical. All the music and all the beauty that had been there had gone out of the house. The house was an empty shell. Like a dry chrysalis. Like a coffin. There, on the hearthrug, where he had crawled as a child, he lay down and cried.