I
Old Thomas Featherstone was dead: he was also buried.
The knot of frowsy females--that strange and ghoulish sisterhood which
frequents such dismal spots as faithfully as dramatic critics the first
nights of theatres--who stood monotonously rocking perambulators on
their back wheels outside the cemetery gates, were unanimously of
opinion that it had been a skinny show. Indeed, Mrs. Wilkins, who was by
way of considering herself what reporters like to call the “doyenne” of
the gathering, said as much by way of consolation to her special crony
Mrs. Pettefer, coming up hot and breathless, five minutes too late for
the afternoon’s entertainment.
“No flars” (thus Mrs. Wilkins), “not one! Not so much as a w’ite
chrysant’! You ’aven’t missed much, me dear, I tell you.”
Mrs. Pettefer, her hand to her heaving bosom, said there was some called
it waste, to be sure, but she did like to see flars ’erself.
“You’d otter’ave seen ’em when they buried the lickle girl yesterday,”
pursued Mrs. Wilkins.
“I _was_ put out, missin’ that, but there, I ’ad to take ar Florence to
the ’orspittle for ’er aneroids,” sighed Mrs. Pettefer, glancing
malevolently at “ar Florence” as if she would gladly have buried her,
without flars, too, by way of paying her out. “I do love a lickle
child’s fruneral.”
“Mask o’ flars, the corfin was,” went on Mrs. Wilkins. “The harum lilies
was lovely. And one big reaf like an ’arp. W’ite ribbinks on the ’orses,
an’ all....”
The connoisseurs in grief dispersed. The driver of the hearse replaced
the black gloves of ceremony by the woollen ones of comfort, for the day
was raw and promised fog later: pulled out a short clay and lit it,
climbed to his box and, whipping up his horses (bays with black
points--“none of your damned prancing Belgians for me,” had been one of
Old Featherstone’s last injunctions), set off at a brisk trot, he to tea
and onions over the stables, they to the pleasant warmth of their stalls
and their waiting oats and hay. Four of old Thomas’s nearest relatives
piled into the first carriage, four more of his remoter kindred into the
second, and the lawyer--Hobbs, Senior, of Hobbs, Keating & Hobbs, of
Chancery Lane--who had lingered behind to settle accounts with the
officiating clergyman, came hurrying down the path between ranks of
tombstones, glimmering pale and ghostly in the greying November
afternoon, to make up a mixed bag in the third and last with Captain
David Broughton, master of the deceased’s ship “Maid of Athens,” and Mr.
Jenkinson, the managing clerk from the office in Billiter Square.
The lawyer was a small, spare man, halting a little from sciatica.
Given a pepper-and-salt coat with wide tails, and a straw in his mouth,
he would have filled the part of a racing tipster to perfection; but in
his sombre funeral array, with his knowing, birdlike way of holding his
head, and his sharp, darting, observant glance, he resembled nothing so
much as a lame starling; and he chattered like a starling, too, as the
carriage rattled away in the wake of the others through the darkening
streets towards the respectable northern suburb where old Featherstone
had lived and died.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, gentlemen,” he said, settling himself in his
place as the coachman slammed the door on the party. “Well, well ...
everything’s passed off very nicely, don’t you think?”
Both Captain Broughton and Mr. Jenkinson, after due consideration,
agreed that “it” had passed off very nicely indeed; though, to be sure,
it would be hard to say precisely what conceivable circumstance might
have occurred to make it do otherwise.
Little Jenkinson sat with his back to the horses. He was the kind of
person who sits with his back to the horses all through life: the kind
of neat, punctual little man to be found in its thousands in the
business offices of the City. He carried, as it were, a perpetual pen
behind his ear. A clerk to his finger-tips--say that of him, and you
have said all; unless perhaps that in private life he was very likely a
bit of a domestic tyrant in some brick box of a semi-detached villa
Tooting or Balham way, who ran his finger along the sideboard every
morning to see if his wife had dusted it properly.
Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the
carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals--that
indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp
horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands,
cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white
split across the knuckles, lay awkwardly, palms uppermost, on his knees.
“Damn the things,” he said to himself for the fiftieth time,
contemplating their empty finger-tips, sticking out flat as the ends of
half-filled pea-pods, “why don’t they make ’em so that a man can get his
hands into ’em?”
A square-set man, a shade under medium height, with a neat beard, once
fair, now faded to a sandy grey, and eyes of the clear ice-blue which
suggested a Scandinavian ancestry, he carried his sixty-odd years well.
A typical shipmaster, one would say at a first glance: a steady man, a
safe man, from whom nothing unexpected need be looked for, one way or
the other. And then, perhaps, those ice-blue eyes would give you pause,
and the thought would cross your mind that there might be certain
circumstances in which the owner of those eyes might conceivably become
no longer a safe and steady quantity, but an unknown and even an
uncomfortable one.
“Don’t mind admitting I’m glad it’s over,” rattled on the little lawyer;
“depressing affairs, these funerals, to my thinking. Horrible. Good for
business, though--our business and doctors’ business, what! More people
get their death through attendin’ other people’s funerals than one likes
to think of. It’s the standing, you know. That’s what does it. Standing
on damp ground. Nothing worse--nothing! And then no hats. That’s where
our friends the Jews have the pull of us Gentiles--eh, Mr. Jenkinson?
If a Jew wants to show respect, he keeps his hat on. Curious, ain’t it?
Ever hear the story about the feller--Spurgeon, was it--or Dr.
Parker--Spurgeon, I think--one or t’other of ’em, anyway, don’t much
matter, really--and the two fellers that kept their hats on while he was
preachin’? ‘If I were to go to a synagogue,’ says Spurgeon--yes, I’m
pretty sure it was Spurgeon--‘if I went to a synagogue,’ says he, ‘I
should keep my hat on; and therefore I should be glad if those two young
Jews in the back of the church would take theirs off in _my_
synagogue’--ha ha ha--good, wasn’t it?...
“And talking about getting cold at funerals, I’ll let you into a little
secret. I always wear an extra singlet, myself, for funerals. Yes; and a
body belt. Got ’em on now. Fact. My wife laughs at me. But I say, ‘Oh,
you may laugh, my dear, but you’d laugh the other side of your face if I
came home with lumbago and you had to sit up half the night ironing my
back.’ Ever try that for lumbago? A common flat iron--_you_ know. Hot as
you can bear it. Best thing going--ab-so-lutely....”
He paused while he rubbed a clear place in the windows which their
breath had misted and peered out like a child going to a party.
“Nearly there, I think,” he went on. “Between ourselves, I think the old
gentleman’s going to cut up remarkably well. Six figures, I shouldn’t
wonder. Not a bit, I shouldn’t.... A shrewd man, Captain Broughton,
don’t you agree?”
Captain Broughton in his dark corner made a vague noise which might be
taken to indicate that he did agree. Not that it mattered, really,
whether he agreed or not. The little lawyer was one of those people who
was so fond of hearing his own voice that he never even noticed if
anyone was listening to him; which was all to the good when you were
feverishly busy with your own thoughts.
“Ah, yes,” he resumed, “a very shrewd, capable man of business! Saw the
way things were going in the shipping world and got out in time. ‘The
sailing ship is done’ (those were his very words to me). ‘If I’d been
thirty years younger I’d have started a fleet of steam kettles with the
best of ’em. But not now--not at my time of life. You can’t teach an old
dog new tricks.’ Those were his very words....
“Ah, ha, here we are at last! Between ourselves, a glass o’ the old
gentleman’s port won’t come amiss. Fine cellar he kept--fine cellar! ‘I
don’t go in for a lot of show, Hobbs,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but
I like what I have _good_....’”