Epilogue.--The Man and the Woman
By daylight there is neither glamour nor beauty in the great
burying-ground of North London; you must go to it at evening, in the
first fall of the summer dusk, to feel the fascination of that labyrinth
of low graves, crosses and headstones, urns and sarcophagi, crowded in
the black-green of the grass; of marble columns, granite pyramids and
obelisks, massed and reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is
nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling
of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world,
gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion
and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and
foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips
a little from the living and death from the dead.
For these have their own way here. No priest interferes with them, and
whatever secular power ordains these matters is indulgent to its
children. If one of them would have his horse or his dog carved on his
tomb instead of an angel, or a pair of compasses instead of a cross,
there is no one to thwart his fancy. He may even be humorous if he will.
It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the
jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.
At twilight a man and a woman were threading their way through this
cemetery, and as they went they smiled faintly at the memorial caprices
of the living and the still quainter originalities of the dead. But on
the whole they seemed to be trying not to look too happy. They said
nothing to each other till they came to a mound raised somewhere in the
borderland that divides the graves of the rich from the paupers' ground.
There was just room for them to stand together on the boards that roofed
in the narrow pit dug ready for the next comer.
"If I believed in a Creator" (it was the man who spoke), "I should want
to know what pleasure he found in creating that poor little woman."
The woman did not answer as she looked at him.
"Yet," he went on, "I'm selfish enough to be glad that she lived. If I
had not known Miss Quincey, I should not have known you."
"And I," said the woman, and her face was rosy under the touch of grief,
"if I had not loved Miss Quincey, I could not have loved you."
They seemed to think Miss Quincey had justified her existence. Perhaps
she had.
And the woman took the roses that she wore in her belt and laid them on
the breast of the grave. She stood for a minute studying the effect with
a shamefaced look, as if she had mocked the dead woman with flowers flung
from her wedding-wreath of youth and joy.
Then she turned to the man; the closing bell tolled, and they passed
through the iron gates into the ways of the living.
THE END