Clare's body was brought back to Greenstream on the following day. His
sister and her numerous brood descended solicitously upon Gordon later;
neighbors, kindly and officious, arrived ... Clare was laid out. There
were sibilant, whispered conversations about a mislaid petticoat with a
mechlin hem; drawers were searched and the missing garment triumphantly
unearthed; silk mitts were discussed, discarded; the white shoes--real
buck and a topnotch article--forced on. At last Clare was exhibited in the
room that had been hers. There was no place in the Makimmon dwelling for
general assemblage but the kitchen, and it had been pointed out by certain
delicate souls that the body and the preparations for the funeral repast
would accord but doubtfully. Besides, the kitchen was too hot.
Clare's peaked, blue-white countenance was withdrawn and strange above a
familiar, harsh black silk dress; her hands, folded upon her flat breast,
lay in a doubled attitude dreadfully impossible to life. A thin locket of
gold hung on a chain about her still throat. The odor of June roses that
filled the corners, a subdued, red riot of the summer, the sun without,
was overpowering.
As the hour appointed for the funeral approached a gratifying number of
people assembled: the women clustered about the porch, hovered about the
door which opened upon the remains; while the men gathered in a group
above the stream, lingered by the fence. A row of dusty, hooded vehicles,
rough-coated, intelligent horses, were hitched above.
The minister took his station by a table on which a glass of water had
been placed upon a vivid red cover: he portentously cleared his throat.
"The Lord giveth," he began.... It was noon, pellucidly clear, still, hot;
the foliage on the mountainsides was like solid walls of greenery rising
to a canopy, a veil, of azure. Partridges whistled clear and flutelike
from a nearby cover; the stream flashed in the sun, mirroring on its
unwrinkled surface the stiff, somber figures gathered for the funeral.
The droning voice of the preacher drew out interminably through the
sultry, golden hour. Women sniffed sharply, dabbled with toil-hardened
hands at their eyes; the men, standing in the grass, shuffled their feet
uneasily. "Let us pray," the speaker dropped upon his knees, and his voice
rose, grew more insistent, shrill with a touch of hysteria. From the back
of the house a hen clucked in an excited, aggravated manner.
Gordon Makimmon stood at the end of the porch, morosely ill at ease: the
memories of Clare as a girl, as a woman going about and performing the
duties of their home, the dignity of his sense of loss and sorrow, had
vanished before this public ceremony; they had sunk to perfunctory,
conventional emotions before the glib flood of the paid eulogist, the
facile emotion of the women.
Suddenly he saw, partially hidden by the dull dresses of the older women,
a white, ruffled skirt, the turn of a young shoulder, a drooping straw
hat. A meager, intervening form moved, and he saw that Lettice Hollidew
had come to his sister's funeral. He wondered, in a momentary, instinctive
resentment, what had brought her among this largely negligent gathering.
She had barely known Clare; Gordon was not certain that she had ever been
in their house. He could see her plainly now--she stood clasping white
gloves with firm, pink hands; her gaze was lowered upon the uneven
flooring of the porch. He could see the soft contour of her chin, a
shimmer of warm, brown hair. She was crisply fresh, incredibly young in
the group of gaunt, worn forms; her ruffled fairness was an affront to the
thin, rigid shoulders in rusty black, the sallow, deeply-bitten faces of
the other women.
She looked up, and surprised his intent gaze: she flushed slightly, the
gloves were twisted into a knot, but her eyes were unwavering--they held
an appeal to his understanding, his sympathy, not to be mistaken. It was
evident that that gaze cost her an effort. She was, Gordon remembered, a
diffident girl. His resentment evaporated.... He speculated upon her
reason for coming; and, speculating, involuntarily stood more erect. With
a swift, surreptitious motion he straightened his necktie.
The Greenstream cemetery lay aslant on a rise above the village. From the
side of the raw, yellow clay hole into which they lowered the coffin
Gordon could see, beyond the black form of the minister, over the rows of
uneven roofs, the bulk of the Courthouse, the sweep of the valley, glowing
with multifarious vitality.
"Dust to dust," said the minister; "ashes to ashes," in the midst of the
warm, the resplendent, the palpitating day. One of Gordon's nephews--a
shock of tow hair rising rebellious against an application of soap,
stubby, scarred hands, shoes obviously come by in their descent from more
mature extremities--who had been audibly snuffling for the past ten
minutes, burst into a lugubrious, frightened wail. Through the solemn,
appointed periods of the minister cut the sibilant, maternal promise of a
famous "whopping."