"I can't, Jenny, I can't. I know there's a funeral coming."
Mary stood on the flagstone inside the arch of the open gate. She looked
up and down the road and drew back again into the garden. Jenny, tired
and patient, waited outside.
"I've told you, Miss Mary, there isn't any funeral."
"If there isn't there will be. There! I can see it."
"You see Mr. Parish's high 'at a driving in his wagonette."
It _was_ Mr. Parish's high hat. When he put the black top on his
wagonette it looked like a hearse.
They started up Ley Street towards Mr. Spall's cottage.
Jenny said, "I thought you was going to be such a good girl when Master
Roddy went to school. But I declare if you're not twice as tiresome."
Roddy had gone to Chelmsted after midsummer. She had to go for walks on
the roads with Jenny now at the risk of meeting funerals.
This week they had been every day to Ilford to call at Mr. Spall's
cottage or at Benny's, the draper's shop in the High Street.
Jenny didn't believe that a big girl, nine next birthday, could really be
afraid of funerals. She thought you were only trying to be tiresome. She
said you could stop thinking about funerals well enough when you wanted.
You did forget sometimes when nice things happened; when you went to see
Mrs. Farmer's baby undressed, and when Isabel Batty came to tea. Isabel
was almost a baby. It felt nice to lift her and curl up her stiff,
barley-sugar hair and sponge her weak, pink silk hands. And there were
things that you could do. You could pretend that you were not Mary
Olivier but somebody else, that you were grown-up and that the baby and
Isabel belonged to you and were there when they were not there. But all
the time you knew there would be a funeral on the road somewhere, and
that some day you would see it.
When they got into the High Street the funeral was coming along the
Barking Road. She saw, before Jenny could see anything at all, the mutes,
sitting high, and their black, bunched-up weepers. She turned and ran out
of the High Street and back over the railway bridge. Jenny called after
her, "Come back!" and a man on the bridge shouted "Hi, Missy! Stop!" as
she ran down Ley Street. Her legs shook and gave way under her. Once she
fell. She ran, staggering, but she ran. People came out of their cottages
to look at her. She thought they had come out to look at the funeral.
After that she refused to go outside the front door or to look through
the front windows for fear she should see a funeral.
They couldn't take her and carry her out; so they let her go for walks in
the back garden. When Papa came home she was sent up to the schoolroom to
play with the doll's house. You could see the road through the high bars
of the window at the end of the passage, so that even when Catty lit the
gas the top floor was queer and horrible.
Sometimes doubts came with her terror. She thought: "Nobody loves me
except Mark. And Mark isn't here." Mark's image haunted her. She shut her
eyes and it slid forward on to the darkness, the strong body, the brave,
straight up and down face, the steady, light brown eyes, shining; the
firm, sweet mouth; the sparrow-brown hair with feathery golden tips. She
could hear Mark's voice calling to her: "Minx! Minky!"
And there was something that Mamma said. It was unkind to be afraid of
the poor dead people. Mamma said, "Would you run away from Isabel if you
saw her lying in her little coffin?"