"If you wish, Fanny."
"It's awfully nice outside," Fanny agreed after a pause during which she looked carefully out of the window. Basine reached for his wife's hand and drew her toward his chair.
"You're looking very well," he smiled at her. A pleasant light came to her eyes. For a moment the youthfulness that people had once admired when they had called her "such an enthusiastic girl" returned to her manner.
"Oh now George!" she exclaimed. Basine felt a catch in his heart. A remorse, as if he had done something, came over him. He patted her hand tenderly. Henrietta repeated but in an almost colorless voice, "Oh, George."
Schroder followed Fanny down the steps. As the door of the Basine apartment closed behind them, his fingers clutched her elbow and he leaned against her in a straightforward, jovial manner.
Her experience as a married woman had brought a directness into Fanny's mind. She no longer found it necessary to conceal her thoughts from herself. She was still inclined to be publicly innocent but her mental life had taken on the proportions of an endless debauch. Marriage not only legalized sex but removed the barriers to thinking about it. She felt herself blushing childishly as Schroder, squeezing her arm, opened the door with a flourish.
15
The Gilchrist home on Lake Shore drive was crowded with friends and relatives. They had come to the funeral of William Gilchrist. Mr.
Gilchrist lay in a coffin in the drawing room, a waxen-faced figure under a glass cover. Flowers filled the large room with a damp, sweet odor.
It was a spring morning. The air was colored with rain. A sulphurous glow lay on the pavements. It was chilly. Automobiles lined the curb outside the Gilchrist stone house. Polite, sober-faced people arrived in couples and groups and walked seriously up the stone steps of the residence, a swarm of mummers striving awkwardly to register grief.
Dignitaries from different strata were assembling. The Gilchrists were a family whose prestige was ramified by varied contacts. Celebrities of the society columns arrived--famous tea pourers, tiara wearers, charity patronesses. Professional men ranging from retired fuddy-duddies, applying their waning financial talents to the diversion of philanthropy, to corporation heads, prominent legal advisors and medical geniuses renowned for their taciturnity--these came for Mrs. Gilchrist.
Bankers, merchants, industrial captains, hospital bigwigs--these came as husbands and also as contemporaries of Mr. Gilchrist.
The leaders of the city's arts--a sprinkling of painters aping the manners of dapper business men, of authors vastly superior to the Bohemian nature of their calling, of advertising Napoleons, opera followers, national advertisers--these came for Aubrey. Fanny, through her brother who had a month before been elected a judge, drew a formidable group of names--political factotums, powers behind thrones, mystic local Cromwells. Also the Younger Set. Added to these were relatives, business associates and finally the Press.
There was a dead man under a glass cover in the house and the distinguished company, crowding the large somber rooms of the Gilchrist home, eyed each other gravely and addressed each other in whispers. The dead man could not hear, yet they spoke in whispers. Even the most renowned of the dignitaries whose lives were a round of formalities almost as impressive as this, spoke in whispers and seemed ill at ease.
They drifted about like nervous butlers and took up positions against the walls, striking uncertain attitudes. They exchanged polite and sober greetings and felt slightly strengthened in spirit at the sight of people as distinguished as themselves. The camaraderie of prestige--the social caress which celebrities alone are able to bestow upon each other by basking in a mutual feeling of superiority--ran like an undercurrent through the scene.
Yet this camaraderie which usually heightened the poise of such gatherings was unable to remove the embarrassment of the company. They spoke in whispers and remained outsiders, as if the Gilchrists were a family of intimidating superiors in whose presence one didn't quite know what to do with one's arms or feet or what to say or just how to make one's features look.
The intimidating superiority was the body under the glass cover of the coffin. It would have been easier in a church. Funerals were much less of a strain in a church and there were several whispers to this effect.
Why had Mrs. Gilchrist insisted upon a home funeral? Wasn't it rather old fashioned?
Here in a house death seemed uncomfortably personal. The stage was too small and the mourners were too near something. A curious sympathy that had nothing to do with Mr. Gilchrist took possession of them.
The damp, sweet odor of the flowers, the glimpse of the black coffin, the sound of softly moving feet and whispering tongues were a distressing ensemble. The mourners drifted around and nodded nervously at each other as if they were doing all they could to make the best of a faux pas. Death was a faux pas. A reality without adjectives. A stark, mannerless lie. The family had done its best also. Flowers had been heaped, furniture arranged, the body dressed, a luxurious coffin purchased, great people invited. Nevertheless the waxen-faced one under the glass cover refused to yield its reality. It lay stark and mannerless in the large room--the immemorial skeleton at the feast--repeating the dreadful word "death" with an almost humorous persistency amid the heaped flowers, the carved furniture, the mourners with raised eyebrows. They stood about nervously.
Gilchrist had been a man alive, one of those whose names were known to the world. The name Gilchrist had meant a large building stored with rugs, period furniture, innumerable clerks, departments, delivery trucks, advertisements in newspapers and on fences. The man Gilchrist had been one with whom the dignitaries of the city had shared the intimacy of prestige.
They had said Gilchrist's was a fine store, Gilchrist's was marvelous furniture, Gilchrist was a highly successful business man. Gilchrist was this and that and the other. And here lay Gilchrist, waxen and unscrupulously silent, under a glass cover--a little man with pale sideburns that were now doubly useless, in a black suit and his hands folded over his chest. Here lay Gilchrist dead, and yet the things that had been called Gilchrist still lived. As if immortality was an artifice, superior to life. The furniture store, the furniture, the clerks, trucks, advertisements, the highly successful business--all these still lived. And this was an uncomfortable fact. It embarrassed the mourners. They drifted about with uncertainty.
Like Gilchrist they were men and women whose names were synonymous with great activities. Like Gilchrist, they were considered as the inspiration of these activities. In fact the activities were an artificial symbol of themselves--a sort of photograph of themselves. Yet like Gilchrist, all of them would lie under a glass cover some day and nothing would be changed. The activities that everybody called by their names would still live. As if they had had nothing to do with them. As if these symbols were the life of the city and not the men and women whom they symbolized. Yes, as if these activities which represented their prestige were independent individualities--masks which loaned themselves for a few years to them to wear. And which they took off when they lay stretched under a glass cover. Which they would take off and become anonymous.
For who was this waxen-faced man in the coffin? Nobody knew. They had called him Gilchrist. But Gilchrist was clerks, advertisements, furniture, and business. This man in the coffin was someone else, an irritating impostor that reminded them they were all impostors. Death was a confession everyone must make; an incongruous confession. An ending to something that had no ending. Life and its activities, even the activities that bore the name Gilchrist, went on. Yet Gilchrist had, mysteriously, come to an end. He lay in a coffin while his name in large letters talked to other names in the advertisements of the city.
The camaraderie of prestige was insufficient to remove this embarrassment. A dead man under a glass cover spoke to them slyly.
Dinners, even very formal dinners with butlers; cliques, even powerful cliques wielding financial destinies; ambitions, board of directors'
meetings, investments and reinvestments, hopes and successes--ah, these were deceptive little excitements that were not a part of life--but an artifice superior to life. For life ended and the little excitements went on. They were the surface immortality in which one conveniently forgot the underlying fact of death.
Alas, death. Alas, waxen-faced men lying silent and mannerless under glass covers. A distasteful faux pas, death. Yet some of the company must weep. Not friends who regretted the everlasting absence of William Gilchrist, but men and women bewildered for a moment by the memory of their own death. Death was a memory since it existed like a foregone conclusion. It was sad to think of all the people who had died, laughing ones, famous ones, adventurous ones whose laughter, fame and adventure seemed somehow a lie now that they were dead.
It was so easy to be dead. Death had come to all who had been, even to more dignified and celebrated ones than they. Alas, death. The sober men and women in the Gilchrist home drifted about nervously. They must weep because for the moment they lay in the coffin with Mr. Gilchrist and because for the moment they walked sadly about mourning visions of their own deaths. And for the moment their tears earned for themselves the regard of their fellow mourners as kind-hearted, sensitive, unselfish souls.
Yet there was something intimate among the company. Despite the embarrassment, a curious spirit of friendliness underlay the scene. Men and women who knew each other only as aloof symbols of prestige, stood together and talked in whispers as if they were talking out of character. Half strangers felt a familiarity toward each other.
Under the stamp of a common emotion and a common embarrassment, the company became for the time a collection of intimates, looking at one another and whispering among themselves as if the event were a truce.
This was a funeral. Here was reality. And it was polite to lay aside for an hour the masks, the complexities of artifice by which they baffled and impressed each other.
The Reverend Henry Peyton had arrived and the mourners moved into the spacious library, grateful for a destination. The widow in black with her son and daughter-in-law appeared. The company surveyed them with a thrill of vicarious grief. Poor Mrs. Gilchrist, so strong and competent!
It seemed almost impossible that she should lose anything, even something as mortal as a husband. She was so fixed and determined. Even now there was something sternly competent about her grief. It was hidden under a black veil. There was nothing to be seen of it but a black veil and a black dress and a pair of wrinkled little hands fumbling with themselves. Poor Mrs. Gilchrist. People had forgotten she was a woman.
They felt slightly ashamed as they glanced at her now, as if they were intruding upon a secret. But she had invited them.
A suppressed "Ah!" of sympathy murmured through the room. The minister's words began and a determined hush followed.
Basine sitting in a corner of the room with his mother had spent an uncomfortable hour waiting for the services. He had looked at the body and come away depressed. His quick eyes had observed the company and noted with a concealed smile the manner in which lesser dignitaries were making hay while the tears poured. They were utilizing the camaraderie of prestige and the intimacy of a common emotion to impress themselves upon the greater dignitaries. Women of dubious social standing gravitated as if by general accident toward women of solid social standing and exchanged whispered condolences with them. Men of lesser financial ratings were edging toward leaders of finance and engaging them in dolorous conversations.
Under the depression and gentle bewilderment, the everlasting business of inferior pursuing superior and superior increasing his superiority by resisting pursuit, was going on. The death of poor Gilchrist seemed to Basine, for a few minutes, chiefly important as an opportunity by which lesser mourners were introducing themselves to the attention of greater mourners.
Basine's eyes noticed another undercurrent. He had himself influenced Fanny to prevail upon Mrs. Gilchrist to invite a number of politicians to the funeral. He had furnished the names carefully, telling Fanny that these were men high in power who had been friends of Mr. Gilchrist. The widow, through her secretary, had asked ten of the list to honor her husband's funeral with their presence. She had chosen ten names most familiar to her, among them men of wealth who were renowned as powers behind the various political thrones of the day. The invitations had served Basine to make a slight but important impression upon the political party leaders.
He had at first felt nervous over Mrs. Gilchrist's selections from his list. She had picked ten men, most of whom were engaged in tenacious political antagonisms. He watched now with surprise as the antagonists gravitated together forming, with a number of financiers, an amiable, dignified group.
"In the presence of death they feel inclined to bury the hatchet," he thought and the idea of large funerals as an asset for establishing political harmony developed in his mind.
He noticed a change in his own attitude toward Aubrey. He had felt for years a distaste for the man and although their relations had always been amicable, this distaste had increased to a point where Basine would have felt a relief at the man's death. He could never tell himself why he disliked Aubrey. But the aversion was of long standing. "I don't like his looks," he would grin to himself.
Now, watching him take his seat beside his mother, Aubrey became somehow human and Basine felt he understood the man for the first time. Beneath people whose looks you didn't like was always something human. People were all alike, no matter how they strutted or posed. Underneath was a loneliness--a little crippled likeness of themselves--that they carried about with them all the time. Basine would have liked to talk to him and say something like, "Sorry, old man. I didn't know. I'm sorry...."
The minister had begun. He stood beside the coffin that had been brought in. His opening words startled Basine. A prayer! There was something fantastic in the spectacle of this living man standing beside the dead man and talking aloud to someone who was not in the room. Talking solemnly, intensely to God. As if he had buttonholed Him.
Basine felt irritated by his own emotions. His face assumed a devout air but the emotions and the thoughts which rose from them persisted behind his determined piety. He wanted to immerse himself in the spirit of the man praying. But his eyes played truant. They wandered furtively and observed with uncomfortable precision the bowed head of Henrietta and the spring hat on her head and the heavy-jowled face of her father, belligerently reverent beside her.
The minister's voice shouted. "God, in Heaven ... his heavenly soul ...
his heavenly reward...."
Phrases like these detached themselves and lingered in Basine's ears. He had heard them frequently in church. But for the moment they seemed preposterously new. He found himself listening in surprise. Religion had been always an accepted idea to him. Something you believed in as you believed in the necessity of neckties. But though he accepted it and felt a casual faith in an Episcopalian God, it remained an idea apart from reality. He had never given either thought or emotion to religion.
Yet he had frequently expended a great deal of mental effort and emotion denouncing people whom he sensed or observed were opposed to religion.
It struck him now as a childish farce--an absurd hocus-pocus. Poor Gilchrist going to heaven and a long-faced man in a black coat speeding his soul heavenward from the Gilchrist library! If there was a God, for whom was all this necessary--the flowers, speeches, prayers? Not for God. But for the people in the room, of course. People crowded in a tiny room taking this opportunity to assure each other that the immensities over their heads, the clouds, stars and spaces were their property.
His iconoclasm increased as if inspired by the length of the minister's harangue. He grew angry with himself and thought of Doris and immediately transferred his anger to her. It was she who was deriding the solemnity of the scene. He had been paying too much attention to her almost insane chatter and things were somewhat undermined in his own soul. Her fault.
The prayer ended and four men came forward and began to sing. Their voices, raised in a hymn, annoyed him instantly. This was too much. What were they singing for? As if their songs would help poor Gilchrist mount from the library into heaven. The entire scene, the bowed heads, sad faces, elaborate coffin; the flowers, the worthy reverend and the singers came to his mind as something terribly unconvincing. Futile, that was it. Children making an unconvincing pretense.
He tried to blot out his thinking and fastened his will upon thoughts that might make him sad, properly sad and believing. What if Henrietta should die.... Henrietta dead. Henrietta gone forever. He seized the thought eagerly. It was not what he wanted but there was a relish in thinking it. Sad ... sad ... yes, if his mother should die or somebody dear to him. Who? Ruth. Ah, what if it were Ruth in the coffin. Instead of anybody else. He would feel differently then. Her beautiful face white as Gilchrist's and her arms still. Her fingers rigid. Ruth dead....