And as Eugene looked, he felt again the nightmare horror of destiny: he was of them—there was no escape. Their lust, their weakness, their sensuality, their fanaticism, their strength, their rich taint, were rooted in the marrow of his bones.
But Ben, with the thin gray face (he thought) was not a part of them. Their mark was nowhere on him.
And among them, sick and old, leaning upon his cane, moved Gant, the alien, the stranger. He was lost and sorrowful, but sometimes, with a flash of his old rhetoric, he spoke of his grief and the death of his son.
The women filled the house with their moaning. Eliza wept almost constantly; Helen by fits, in loose hysterical collapse. And all the other women wept with gusto, comforting Eliza and her daughter, falling into one another’s arms, wailing with keen hunger. And the men stood sadly about, dressed in their good clothes, wondering when it would be over. Ben lay in the parlor, bedded in his expensive coffin. The room was heavy with the incense of the funeral flowers.
Presently the Scotch minister arrived: his decent soul lay above all the loud posturings of grief like a bolt of hard clean wool. He began the service for the dead in a dry nasal voice, remote, monotonous, cold, and passionate.
Then, marshalled by Horse Hines, the pallbearers, young men from the paper and the town, who had known the dead man best, moved slowly out, gripping the coffin-handles with their nicotined fingers. In proper sequence, the mourners followed, lengthening out in closed victorias that exhaled their funeral scent of stale air and old leather.
To Eugene came again the old ghoul fantasy of a corpse and cold pork, the smell of the dead and hamburger steak—the glozed corruption of Christian burial, the obscene pomps, the perfumed carrion. Slightly nauseated, he took his seat with Eliza in the carriage, and tried to think of supper.
The procession moved off briskly to the smooth trotting pull of the velvet rumps. The mourning women peered out of the closed carriages at the gaping town. They wept behind their heavy veils, and looked to see if the town was watching. Behind the world’s great mask of grief, the eyes of the mourners shone through with a terrible and indecent hunger, an unnameable lust.
It was raw October weather—gray and wet. The service had been short, as a precaution against the pestilence which was everywhere. The funeral entered the cemetery. It was a pleasant place, on a hill. There was a good view of the town. As the hearse drove up, two men who had been digging the grave, moved off. The women moaned loudly when they saw the raw open ditch.
Slowly the coffin was lowered onto the bands that crossed the grave.
Again Eugene heard the nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The boy’s mind fumbled at little things. Horse Hines bent ceremoniously, with a starched crackle of shirt, to throw his handful of dirt into the grave. “Ashes to ashes—” He reeled and would have fallen in if Gilbert Gant had not held him. He had been drinking. “I am the resurrection and the life—” Helen wept constantly, harshly and bitterly. “He that believeth in me—” The sobs of the women rose to sharp screams as the coffin slid down upon the bands into the earth.
Then the mourners got back into their carriages and were driven briskly away. There was a fast indecent hurry about their escape. The long barbarism of burial was at an end. As they drove away, Eugene peered back through the little glass in the carriage. The two gravediggers were already returning to their work. He watched until the first shovel of dirt had been thrown into the grave. He saw the raw new graves, the sere long grasses, noted how quickly the mourning wreaths had wilted. Then he looked at the wet gray sky. He hoped it would not rain that night.
It was over. The carriages split away from the procession. The men dropped off in the town at the newspaper office, the pharmacy, the cigar-store. The women went home. No more. No more.
Night came, the bare swept streets, the gaunt winds. Helen lay before a fire in Hugh Barton’s house. She had a bottle of chloroform liniment in her hand. She brooded morbidly into the fire, reliving the death a hundred times, weeping bitterly and becoming calm again.
“When I think of it, I hate her. I shall never forget. And did you hear her? Did you? Already she’s begun to pretend how much he loved her. But you can’t fool me! I know! He wouldn’t have her around. You saw that, didn’t you? He kept calling for me. I was the only one he’d let come near him. You know that, don’t you?”
“You’re the one who always has to be the goat,” said Hugh Barton sourly. “I’m getting tired of it. That’s what has worn you out. If they don’t leave you alone, I’m going to take you away from here.”
Then he went back to his charts and pamphlets, frowning importantly over a cigar, and scrawling figures on an old envelope with a stub of pencil gripped between his fingers.
She has him trained, too, Eugene thought.
Then, hearing the sharp whine of the wind, she wept again.
“Poor old Ben,” she said. “I can’t bear to think of him out there tonight.”
She was silent for a moment, staring at the fire.
“After this, I’m through,” she said. “They can get along for themselves. Hugh and I have a right to our own lives. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” said Eugene. I’m merely the chorus, he thought.
“Papa’s not going to die,” she went on. “I’ve nursed him like a slave for six years, and he’ll be here when I’m gone. Everyone was expecting papa to die, but it was Ben who went. You never can tell. After
