agreed seriously, “you’re right.” To walk together to the kirk, with a goodly company.

He thought sadly of his lost sobriety, and of how once, lonely, he had walked the decent lanes of God’s Scotch town. Unbidden they came again to haunt his memory, the shaven faces of good tradesmen, each leading the well washed kingdom of his home in its obedient ritual, the lean hushed smiles of worship, the chained passion of devotion, as they implored God’s love upon their ventures, or delivered their virgin daughters into the holy barter of marriage. And from even deeper adyts of his brain there swam up slowly to the shores of his old hunger the great fish whose names he scarcely knew⁠—whose names, garnered with blind toil from a thousand books, from Augustine, himself a name, to Jeremy Taylor, the English metaphysician, were brief evocations of scalded light, electric, phosphorescent, illuminating by their magic connotations the vast far depths of ritual and religion: They came⁠—Bartholomew, Hilarius, Chrysostomos, Polycarp, Anthony, Jerome, and the forty martyrs of Cappadocia who walked the waves⁠—coiled like their own green shadows for a moment, and were gone.

“Besides,” said George Graves, “a man ought to go anyway. Honesty’s the best policy.”

Across the street, on the second floor of a small brick three-story building that housed several members of the legal, medical, surgical, and dental professions, Dr. H. M. Smathers pumped vigorously with his right foot, took a wad of cotton from his assistant, Miss Lola Bruce, and thrusting it securely into the jaw of his unseen patient, bent his fashionable bald head intently. A tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains, and revealed him, white-jacketed, competent, drill in hand.

“Do you feel that?” he said tenderly.

“Wrogd gdo gurk!”

“Spit!” With thee conversing, I forget all time.

“I suppose,” said George Graves thoughtfully, “the gold they use in people’s teeth is worth a lot of money.”

“Yes,” said Eugene, finding the idea attractive, “if only one person in ten has gold fillings that would be ten million in the United States alone. You can figure on five dollars’ worth each, can’t you?”

“Easy!” said George Graves. “More than that.” He brooded lusciously a moment. “That’s a lot of money,” he said.

In the office of the Rogers-Malone Undertaking Establishment the painful family of death was assembled. “Horse” Hines, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his feet thrust out on the broad window-ledge, chatted lazily with Mr. C. M. Powell, the suave silent partner. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest. Forget not yet.

“There’s good money in undertaking,” said George Graves. “Mr. Powell’s well off.”

Eugene’s eyes were glued on the lantern face of “Horse” Hines. He beat the air with a convulsive arm, and sank his fingers in his throat.

“What’s the matter?” cried George Graves.

“They shall not bury me alive,” he said.

“You can’t tell,” George Graves said gloomily. “It’s been known to happen. They’ve dug them up later and found them turned over on their faces.”

Eugene shuddered. “I think,” he suggested painfully, “they’re supposed to take out your insides when they embalm you.”

“Yes,” said George Graves more hopefully, “and that stuff they use would kill you anyway. They pump you full of it.”

With shrunken heart, Eugene considered. The ghost of old fear, that had been laid for years, walked forth to haunt him.

In his old fantasies of death he had watched his living burial, had foreseen his waking life-in-death, his slow, frustrated efforts to push away the smothering flood of earth until, as a drowning swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers thrust from the ground a call for hands.

Fascinated, they stared through screen-doors down the dark central corridor, flanked by jars of weeping ferns. A sweet funereal odor of carnations and cedarwood floated on the cool heavy air. Dimly, beyond a central partition, they saw a heavy casket, on a wheeled trestle, with rich silver handles and velvet coverings. The thick light faded there in dark.

“They’re laid out in the room behind,” said George Graves, lowering his voice.

To rot away into a flower, to melt into a tree with the friendless bodies of unburied men.

At this moment, having given to misery all he had (a tear), the very Reverend Father James O’Haley, S.J., among the faithless faithful only he, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, emerged plumply from the chapel, walked up the soft aisle rug with brisk short-legged strides, and came out into the light. His pale blue eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, his plump uncreased face set firmly in a smile of quiet benevolence; he covered himself with a small well-kept hat of black velvet, and set off toward the avenue. Eugene shrank back gently as the little man walked past him: that small priestly figure in black bore on him the awful accolade of his great Mistress, that smooth face had heard the unutterable, seen the unknowable. In this remote outpost of the mighty Church, he was the standard-bearer of the one true faith, the consecrate flesh of God.

“They don’t get any pay,” said George Graves sorrowfully.

“How do they live, then?” Eugene asked.

“Don’t you worry!” said George Graves, with a knowing smile.

“They get all that’s coming to them. He doesn’t seem to be starving, does he?”

“No,” said Eugene, “he doesn’t.”

“He lives on the fat of the land,” said George Graves. “Wine at every meal. There are some rich Catholics in this town.”

“Yes,” said Eugene. “Frank Moriarty’s got a pot full of money that he made selling licker.”

“Don’t let them hear you,” said George Graves, with a surly laugh. “They’ve got a family tree and a coat of arms already.”

“A beer-bottle rampant on a field of limburger cheese, gules,” said Eugene.

“They’re trying to get the Princess Madeleine into Society,” said George Graves.

“Hell fire!” Eugene cried, grinning. “Let’s let her in, if that’s all she wants. We belong to the Younger Set, don’t we?”

“You may,” said George Graves, reeling with laughter, “but I don’t. I wouldn’t be caught dead with the little pimps.”

Mr. Eugene Gant was the host last night at

Вы читаете Look Homeward, Angel
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату