Aunt Lavvy gave Mary the flower cross and climbed stiffly into the wagonette. Mary felt grown up and important holding the big cross on her knee. The white flowers gave out a thick, sweet smell.
As they drove away she kept on thinking about Aunt Charlotte, and about Uncle Victor bringing Grandmamma in a coffin in the train. It was very, very brave of him. She was sorry for Aunt Charlotte. Aunt Charlotte had wanted to go to the cemetery and they hadn’t let her go. Perhaps she was still looking over the blind, sharp and angry because they wouldn’t let her go.
Aunt Lavvy said, “We couldn’t take Charlotte. It excited her too much last time.” As if she knew what you were thinking.
The wagonette stopped by the railway-crossing at Manor Park, and they got out. Mamma told Mr. Parish to drive round to the Leytonstone side and wait for them there at the big gates. They wanted to walk through the cemetery and see what was to be seen.
Beyond the railway-crossing a muddy lane went along a field of coarse grass under a hedge of thorns and ended at a paling. Roddy whispered excitedly that they were in Wanstead Flats. The hedge shut off the cemetery from the flats; through thin places in the thorn bushes you could see tombstones, very white tombstones against very dark trees. There was a black wooden door in the hedge for you to go in by. The lane and the thorn bushes and the black door reminded Mary of something she had seen before somewhere. Something frightening.
When they got through the black door there were no tombstones. What showed through the hedge were the tops of high white pillars standing up among trees a long way off. They had come into a dreadful, bare, clay-coloured plain, furrowed into low mounds, as if a plough had gone crisscross over it.
You saw nothing but mounds. Some of them were made of loose earth; some were patched over with rough sods that gaped in a horrible way. Perhaps if you looked through the cracks you would see down into the grave where the coffin was. The mounds had a fresh, raw look, as if all the people in the City of London had died and been buried hurriedly the night before. And there were no stones with names, only small, flat sticks at one end of each grave to show where the heads were.
Roddy said, “We’ve got to go all through this to get to the other side.”
They could see Mamma and Aunt Lavvy a long way on in front picking their way gingerly among the furrows. If only Mark had been there instead of Roddy. Roddy would keep on saying: “The great plague of London. The great plague of London,” to frighten himself. He pointed to a heap of earth and said it was the first plague pit.
In the middle of the ploughed-up plain she saw people in black walking slowly and crookedly behind a coffin that went staggering on black legs under a black pall. She tried not to look at them.
When she looked again they had stopped beside a heap that Roddy said was the second plague pit. Men in black crawled out from under the coffin as they put it down. She could see the bulk of it flattened out under the black pall. Against the raw, ochreish ground the figures of two mutes stood up, black and distinct in their high hats tied in the bunched out, streaming weepers. There was something filthy and frightful about the figures of the mutes. And when they dragged the pall from the coffin there was something filthy and frightful about the action.
“Roddy,” she said, “I’m frightened.”
Roddy said, “So am I. I say, supposing we went back? By ourselves. Across Wanstead Flats.” He was excited.
“We mustn’t. That would frighten Mamma.”
“Well, then, we’ll have to go straight through.”
They went, slowly, between the rows of mounds, along a narrow path of yellow clay that squeaked as their boots went in and out. Roddy held her hand. They took care not to tread on the graves. Every step brought them nearer to the funeral. They hadn’t pointed it out to each other. They had pretended it wasn’t there. Now it was no use pretending; they could see the coffin.
“Roddy—I can’t—I can’t go past the funeral.”
“We’ve got to.”
He looked at her with solemn eyes, wide open in his beautiful face. He was not really frightened, he was only trying to be because he liked it.
They went on. The tight feeling under her waist had gone; her body felt loose and light as if it didn’t belong to her; her knees were soft and sank under her. Suddenly she let go Roddy’s hand. She stared at the funeral, paralysed with fright.
At the end of the path Mamma and Aunt Lavvy stood and beckoned to them. Aunt Lavvy was coming towards them, carrying her white flower cross. They broke into a stumbling, nightmare run.
The bare clay plain stretched on past the place where Mamma and Aunt Lavvy had turned. The mounds here were big and high. They found Mamma and Aunt Lavvy standing by a very deep and narrow pit. A man was climbing up out of the pit on a ladder. You could see a pool of water shining far down at the bottom.
Mamma was smiling gently and kindly at the man and asking him why the grave was dug so deep. He said, “Why, because this ’ere lot and that there what you’ve come acrost is the pauper buryin’ ground. We shovel ’em in five at a time this end.”
Roddy said, “Like they did in the great plague of London.”
“I don’t know about no plague. But there’s five coffins in each of these here graves, piled one atop of the other.”
Mamma seemed inclined to say more to the gravedigger; but Aunt
