nocturnal animals.
“Mary’s over there,” someone said; and Mr. Miles, taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman lay on her back, her eyes staring up unblinkingly at the candle that trembled in Mr. Miles’s hand.
“She jus’ dropped off,” a woman said, over the shoulder of the others; and the young man added: “I jus’ come in and found her.”
An elderly man with lank hair and a feeble grin pushed between them. “It was like this: I says to her on’y the night before: if you don’t take and quit, I says to her…”
Someone pulled him back and sent him reeling against a bench along the wall, where he dropped down muttering his unheeded narrative.
There was a silence; then the young woman who had been lolling against the table suddenly parted the group, and stood in front of Charity. She was healthier and robuster looking than the others, and her weather-beaten face had a certain sullen beauty.
“Who’s the girl? Who brought her here?” she said, fixing her eyes mistrustfully on the young man who had rebuked her for not having a candle ready.
Mr. Miles spoke. “I brought her; she is Mary Hyatt’s daughter.”
“What? Her too?” the girl sneered; and the young man turned on her with an oath. “Shut your mouth, damn you, or get out of here,” he said; then he relapsed into his former apathy, and dropped down on the bench, leaning his head against the wall.
Mr. Miles had set the candle on the floor and taken off his heavy coat. He turned to Charity. “Come and help me,” he said.
He knelt down by the mattress, and pressed the lids over the dead woman’s eyes. Charity, trembling and sick, knelt beside him, and tried to compose her mother’s body. She drew the stocking over the dreadful glistening leg, and pulled the skirt down to the battered upturned boots. As she did so, she looked at her mother’s face, thin yet swollen, with lips parted in a frozen gasp above the broken teeth. There was no sign in it of anything human: she lay there like a dead dog in a ditch Charity’s hands grew cold as they touched her.
Mr. Miles drew the woman’s arms across her breast and laid his coat over her. Then he covered her face with his handkerchief, and placed the bottle with the candle in it at her head. Having done this he stood up.
“Is there no coffin?” he asked, turning to the group behind him.
There was a moment of bewildered silence; then the fierce girl spoke up. “You’d oughter brought it with you. Where’d we get one here, I’d like ter know?”
Mr. Miles, looking at the others, repeated: “Is it possible you have no coffin ready?”
“That’s what I say: them that has it sleeps better,” an old woman murmured. “But then she never had no bed….”
“And the stove warn’t hers,” said the lank-haired man, on the defensive.
Mr. Miles turned away from them and moved a few steps apart. He had drawn a book from his pocket, and after a pause he opened it and began to read, holding the book at arm’s length and low down, so that the pages caught the feeble light. Charity had remained on her knees by the mattress: now that her mother’s face was covered it was easier to stay near her, and avoid the sight of the living faces which too horribly showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Mr. Miles began; “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live….Though after my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God….”
IN MY FLESH SHALL I SEE GOD! Charity thought of the gaping mouth and stony eyes under the handkerchief, and of the glistening leg over which she had drawn the stocking….
“We brought nothing into this world and we shall take nothing out of it–-“
There was a sudden muttering and a scuffle at the back of the group. “I brought the stove,” said the elderly man with lank hair, pushing his way between the others. “I wen’ down to Creston’n bought it…n’ I got a right to take it outer here…n’ I’ll lick any feller says I ain’t….”
“Sit down, damn you!” shouted the tall youth who had been drowsing on the bench against the wall.
“For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them….”
“Well, it ARE his,” a woman in the background interjected in a frightened whine.
The tall youth staggered to his feet. “If you don’t hold your mouths I’ll turn you all out o’ here, the whole lot of you,” he cried with many oaths. “G’wan, minister…don’t let ‘em faze you….”
“Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of them that slept….Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump….For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and when this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory….”
One by one the mighty words fell on Charity’s bowed head, soothing the horror, subduing the tumult, mastering her as they mastered the drink-dazed creatures at her back. Mr. Miles read to the last word, and then closed the book.
“Is the grave ready?” he asked.
Liff Hyatt, who had come in while he was reading, nodded a “Yes,” and pushed forward to the side of the mattress. The young man on the bench who seemed to assert some sort of right of kinship with the dead woman, got to his feet again, and the proprietor of the stove joined him. Between them they raised up the mattress; but
