“Alone,” she repeated in a low voice, so that her voice might not reach through the splashing of a damp cloth to Mrs. Butler’s ears. “No, we shan’t be alone. You don’t know these country people. I hate them,” she added with unexpected intensity. “This is a show to them. They’ll flock to it, but I shan’t feed them. They’ll expect to be fed. They haven’t been near me since he died, and I’d have welcomed anyone for a bit of company in the evening. They never came when he was alive.”
“What do you mean?” he raised his voice in unthinking fear. “A crowd of them?” He took hold of her wrist. “If you’ve planned this,” he said.
“Need you be a fool as well as a coward?” she answered in an offhand tired fashion. “Why should I plan anything? I’m not sufficiently interested in you.” She released her hand and moved out of doors. “I don’t know why I’ve helped you as much as I have,” she added with a small shrug.
He followed still suspicious. He felt unreasonably grieved that this cottage was not the lonely woodland house, which he had imagined. “Don’t take credit for that,” he said. “I forced you to it.”
She did not look at him. Her hands were on her hips and she stared at the down over which he had come with a small wrinkle of perplexity. She seemed to be trying to puzzle out the reason behind her acts. “It was not fear,” she said, but it was not to him that she replied. “It would be a fool who’d be afraid of you,” she said and smiled as though at an amusing memory. “I suppose I was tired of being alone.”
III
“And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.”
The priest was tall and thin and stooping and he suffered from a running cold. He snuffled between each phrase as he took long, loping strides through the graveyard. It was a raw day and he appeared anxious to get through with a dreary business. Between every phrase he snuffled and at the end of every sentence he gave a hasty furtive wipe at his nose with a corner of his surplice that blew out in the wind like a banner. He strode, not concealing his hatred of the cold, but those that followed after, a large straying band of intense villagers, walked as slowly as he allowed them, seemed almost to hold him back by the flapping end of his surplice. They refused to be cheated of a funeral. Their cheeks and noses were scarlet and their eyes sparkled like frost and peered avariciously after the wooden coffin.
It means nothing to them at all, the girl thought with acidity, sonorous words floating with strange lightness for their bulk over her head. They were here because a funeral was something to see, because, when rightly managed, it meant beer and cakes and because the long eddy of words that gathered together at regular intervals to rise and burst in a great ninth phrase (“Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live”) made them feel important. She would not give them beer and cakes, for she had been fond of the spirit that had inhabited the body carried before them. Yet because she had had no love for the body itself, which when she was small had beaten her and when she grew older had made strange crude gestures blindly towards her and repelled her, she felt unmoved. She was accustomed now to the absence of the cursing, unhappy, perplexed spirit. She had loved that with a quiet steady warmth. It had fed her and sheltered her and she was grateful, and when towards the end she had seen it putting up the best fight it was able against its own groping, sneering body, she had pitied it.
“For I am a stranger with thee; and a sojourner as all my fathers were. O spare me a little that I may recover my strength: before I go hence and be no more seen.”
Andrews stirred a little. They were the first words that had reached his consciousness since the fear of many persons had dumbed his heart. He was afraid when the villagers had arrived, the women to inspect the corpse and the men to look in vain for beer. Each new face had been a stab of anxiety and when unrecognised a faint relief, until the steady alternating currents of fear and comfort had lulled his mind asleep. He had been helped, turning his back on the chattering women, by the sight of the sea mist that poised itself for a moment on the top of the down over which he had come. Blown by a breeze behind, too faint to disperse it, it tottered for a moment drunkenly on the edge, and then fell in swathe after swathe into the valley. Its coming brought a sense of secrecy and of what he knew at heart was a false security. His unconsciousness held nothing but a dim irony and a perception of farce. He was the brother of the chief mourner, but the ceremony was to him only a solemn mummery. The man they put into the ground and for whom all these persons sang at intervals in a dreary whine was unknown to him and meant nothing more to him than the sudden sight of a bearded face and the dart of a falling golden star.
The girl—Elizabeth—his sister (it was hard to remember that she was his sister) had remained silent in the midst of a swiftly running current of voices. When the undertaker’s man had turned down the lid of the coffin
