The Quick and the Dead (13 page)

Not these thoughts, but their sensational equivalent, had quickened me with new life when that telegram came. Already, in anticipation, I renewed my pleasure in his brown tweeds, the loud checks of his riding breeches, the sheen and scent of his leather gaiters, to say nothing of his ruddy, finely-wrinkled, weather-beaten face, and his copious gushing whiskers with that hint of fire in their brown. And so, when he stepped from the train, and handed my aunt out, I was hard put to it to hide my dismay at finding my ministering angels swathed in mourning black from head to foot. My poor uncle, with his tall silk hat, his stock, his frock coat, his carefully rolled umbrella, would be a figure of fun could we see him to-day; and even then, to me who had looked for so different a figure, there was something pathetic as well as repellent in this
pompous disguise. He and my aunt were evidently resolved to ‘show respect' in no uncertain manner, but this thought came to me later: at the time it seemed to me in my bitterness that the tribute was paid rather to Death than to my mother, and I was in no mood to propitiate that exalted personage, whom, in my fancy, I identified with the Bethelite God. How my mother would have teased him, had she seen Uncle Claybrook now; and perhaps she can see him, I thought suddenly; perhaps she's with us all the time, wondering at our foolishness yet sharing our pain. But I did not believe it, for I had seen her dead; and though my heart cried out that it was not Mother that lay there marbled and still, no consolatory belief could outface the stark fact that I saw.

But now, sitting with them in the trundling cab, I was reassured to see that despite their fantastic ceremonial garb these kindly souls were still, after all, themselves. And when my aunt said, in her practical way, ‘Haven't you got any proper clothes, dear?', I shrugged my shoulders almost tolerantly, almost without resentment of the sartorial transformation in store for me, a matter to which, hitherto, having no elders at hand to instruct me, I had given no thought.

‘I suppose,' said my uncle reflectively, ‘an arm-band wouldn't be enough for the lad, seeing he
is
a lad? And a pair of black gloves, of course,' he added hastily.

‘Oh, Frank! What can you be thinking of?' She was shocked, poor woman. Her god had been blasphemed. ‘And him the chief mourner too!'

‘Well, you know best,' said my uncle, looking as though he wished he hadn't spoken. ‘But as for chief mourner—what about Bob?'

‘Ah,' said my aunt, with tragic unction. ‘That's what we
all
want to know. I'm sure I don't know
what
to think, after what Claud has told us.'

We knew as little what to think when we reached the house, and having entered with my latchkey by the house door (the shop being shut), went from room to room in search of Calamy. We called: at first softly, then less softly. But there was no response. Upstairs there was a locked room, of which I had the key. I hoped that Calamy was not there.

At last we found him in the shop. In shirtsleeves, with his cobbler's apron tied round his waist, he sat in his accustomed chair, deep in thought. We crowded in at the door and stood staring.

‘Here's Uncle Claybrook and Aunt Bertfia,'
I ventured after a while. He did not answer, so I went up to him and touched him.

He raised his head and looked, though not at me. ‘Leave me alone. You're all dead, every one of you. Fleer, Jarnders … it's funny to see them still walking about. But don't be afraid, Essie. They're all dead but us.'

My uncle came forward. ‘Hullo, Bob, old friend. Won't you say How-do to us?'

Calamy stared dazedly at the brawny outstretched hand; then shook his head, as if dismissing a fancy, and fell again into pensive-ness. And presently, as we watched him, he stooped down from where he sat, and with his finger wrote on the ground.

My aunt had thought for other things than the insignia of mourning. Within an hour of her entry she had transformed that charnel house into something like the home it once had been, cleaning our lamps for us, lighting fires in several rooms for the sake of the cheerfulness they might help to impart, and stocking our sadly depleted larder with fresh provisions. Distressed though she was, she did not allow our consciousness of Calamy's strange condition to dominate the conversation, though she could not prevent its providing a dark undercurrent to our thoughts. ‘He'll be all right presently,' she said, speaking as of a child. ‘Won't you, Bob?' At nine o'clock she had us all, even Calamy who could not believe in our substantial existence, sitting down to a hot supper, for which, from a brisk shopping expedition in which I had joined her, she had even gone so far as to provide a bottle of grocer's wine. ‘Yes, you're to have some, Claud, even though you don't want it. It'll do you good, ducky.' I conceived that evening a passionate regard for my Aunt
Bertha, and I was quite at a loss to understand how this powerful common sense of hers, this simple and beautiful humanity, left room in her mind for merely conventional anxieties. Next morning, however, her first care was to take me to Farringay and have me fitted up with a ready-made suit of black: a process to which I submitted with as good a grace as I could command. That Calamy would be himself again presently was a statement often on her lips; and we knew, my uncle and I, that by ‘presently' she meant ‘after the funeral', that much dreaded and much longed-for event which would put a term to this particular chapter of our misery and set us free, not from sorrow, but from our preoccupation with the gross physiology of death. The presence of a dead body in the house oppressed me as the ugly irrelevance it was; and that this body must be disposed of with solemn pomp, and after a ‘reverent' interval, as though it were indeed my mother herself that lay coffined in that lily-laden room, affected me as a blasphemy against all I held dear.

The hour came at last. Half-past one. Spring, careless of our mourning, presented her fairest aspect. There was gold and bird-song in the air outside, and within the house were four mortals for whom that beauty could
have, as yet, no meaning except a bitter one. With my uncle and aunt I stood in the parlour, trying to force my moist fingers into those new black gloves, and averting my eyes from the window lest they should have sight of the hearse that stood at our door. Yet my glance was drawn there in spite of myself, and I could not but see the four black-clothed strangers with wooden faces and tall broad-banded hats who had come to knock at our door. My aunt slipped out of the room; I heard the men enter, heard their boots on the stairs, and waited in an agony for what should follow. Still working desperately at my gloved fingers, I stared at the worn carpet. Overhead were shuffling footsteps; and soon they were descending the stairs, and with a changed rhythm. Must I be dragged from my sweet and poignant memories to listen to that? And, having listened, must I step out into the intolerable sunshine and ride in a carriage to Suthergate with a sniffling old woman and a red-faced black-coated clown for companions? But I could not, for all my trying, spend much bitterness on my uncle and aunt; it was easier to hate the chance-met strangers who stood, with lifted hats, to see our carriage pass; and my heart warmed to Uncle Claybrook when he suddenly woke me
from my abstraction with a tap on the knee and said in a very secular matter-of-fact tone, ‘When this business is over, Claud, you and I must see about putting poor Bob to rights.'

I nodded. ‘I don't believe he's had any sleep at all for the last four days. Why has the carriage stopped, uncle? Are we there?'

I could not bring myself to look out of the window to see what delayed us. But my uncle had no such scruples.

‘Yes, we've arrived,' he said. ‘But there's another funeral in front of us by the look of it. Lot of people, too. Very bad management that. Disgraceful.'

This hitch in the order of an all-important ceremony was too much for my aunt. Her sniffling became frankly a wail, and nothing that we could do or say, which was precious little, availed to persuade her that for her dear Essie's funeral to be kept waiting at the cemetery gates was nothing worse than a painful and absurd accident. To her it was a shameful thing, though she could not or would not explain why. There followed fifteen minutes of agony for us all. In a frenzy I put my head boldly, and (as my aunt insisted) irreverently, out of the window; and at sight of Mr Jarnders and other familiar Little Bethelites stepping from their carriages
I knew whose obsequies it was that were delaying us.

At last we were in motion again, and the dreary business of the day went on. I will not hurt myself further by recalling moments—so vivid and unreal—that I wish only to forget. In one point, and one only, I had been able to please myself in the funeral arrangements; for it was Tom Latitude, no other, who conducted the service in that squat little cemetery chapel, and Tom Latitude who, at the graveside, when the last ritual words had been said, snatched me out of the pit by speaking, as the Quakers say, to my condition. For, as I turned to follow the Claybrooks to the waiting carriage, an arm was slipped in mine. I knew it was Mr Latitude's, but I was in tears and dared not look at him.

‘You're glad that's over, I'm sure,' he said cheerfully. I did not answer, and after a pause he added: ‘You can forget about all that part of it now, as soon as you like. It's rather an ugly thing, a funeral. And not very Christian.'

I found a voice to say: ‘It's beastly.'

‘Yes,' he agreed. ‘Rather beastly in a way. Now those words about the resurrection you heard me say. You remember: we therefore commit her body to the grave in the sure and
certain hope of a glorious resurrection. That almost makes you think that she herself is in the grave, doesn't it? But of course that's nonsense. It wasn't your mother that we buried. It was only the clothes she wore, the house she lived in. You know that, I'm sure.'

‘But where,' I asked, ‘where is she herself,
now?'

‘The spirit shall return to God who gave it,' said Mr Latitude; and, though I had never heard the Bible quoted with less parade of piety, the words jarred on me. The man was a parson after all, and, like the rest of them, I thought bitterly, must hide behind his formulæ.

‘I don't believe there
is
a God,' I announced defiantly. ‘And if there were I should hate him for killing my mother.'

‘Ah,' he said, ‘it's not quite that kind of God I'm talking about.'

I had hardly expected to shock him by my outburst, yet was not prepared for quite so calm a reception of it. He did not debate the question, but went off on a line of his own, talking of beauty and goodness, and offering me not a creed—though he seemed to think it that—but a sentiment. It was, I have no doubt, a very excellent sentiment, and, though it did not begin to answer my questions, it
served the more immediate purpose of distracting me from grief. And now, having reached the cemetery gates where my uncle and aunt were waiting for me, I plucked up courage to speak to him of Calamy, and to ask him to come home with us. For I had faith in Tom Latitude, if not in his God; and I had persuaded myself that he, if anyone, could win Calamy from the dream in which he was imprisoned.

Calamy had been left at home, the kindly Mr Wiccombe having consented to keep him company; and in the shop, which was filled with tobacco smoke from Mr Wiccombe's pipe, we found them sitting in silence together.

Not very hopefully I went and stood within two feet of where Calamy sat. ‘Mr. Latitude has come to see you, Dad.'

‘Well, Claud,' said Calamy. My heart leapt with joy that he recognized me. Was Aunt Bertha's prediction already fulfilled? But the sharp look he gave me was anything but reassuring. ‘You're a clever boy, aren't you? You think you've put her away. But you haven't: I've got her. I've got her
here.'
He tapped his forehead with slow deliberation, and the gesture frightened me as nothing else in his behaviour had done.

My darkest hour was now past, and there were happy days ahead. But this I could not know as we sat over our teacups, we four, sadly debating the problem of Calamy. The phrase he had used about ‘putting away', and the tapping of the forehead that accompanied it, had by their accidental aptness to his own situation all too clearly defined my unspoken terror for him. That terror, that vile possibility, could no longer be ignored.

But if it could not be ignored it could be kept a secret from the others for so long as they remained blind to it. I myself would not utter a revealing or suggestive word. As though I held a watching brief for this man who had been more than a father to me, I listened warily to all that my elders said. I was waiting to hear one of them voice this secret thought of mine, that I might indignantly deny it; I gathered myself ready to oppose with all my small power any suggestion they might make that involved bringing a doctor on the scene. For I was resolved to have no strangers meddling with Calamy. Let his
mind be as disordered as it might—that was his misfortune and mine, and we would deal with it as best we could, together. But there must be no doctors; and, above all, no talk of ‘putting away'. The world at large, as I saw it, was our enemy, faithless and malicious. Given its chance it would smile and smile and turn the key on him in triumph. The thought of physical danger hardly entered my head; for I could not conceive it possible that I should ever be afraid of Calamy.

‘Claud thinks it's nothing but want of sleep,' remarked Uncle Claybrook, after some half hour's desultory and dismal conversation. ‘Don't you, my boy?'

‘Yes,' I said eagerly. ‘I don't believe he's slept a wink ever since Mother died. You can see it by his eyes. They're so bright and dark and staring.'

‘That's true,' said Mr Latitude, nodding reflectively.

‘I didn't sleep a lot myself,' I added, anxious to consolidate the ground I had won. ‘I often went into his bedroom at night, and he was always awake, always.'