As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of
physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases;
the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek
a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by
Margaret Aubyn’s grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental
reparation, but rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the
reality of the tie between them.
The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to
share the narrow hospitality of her husband’s last lodging; but though
Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited
her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a
chilling vision of her return. There was no family to follow her hearse;
she had died alone, as she had lived; and the “distinguished mourners”
who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman
they were committing to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at
what season she had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it
must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February
brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues
stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of
affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to
marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a
frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the
most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for
the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those
easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the
living. Glennard’s eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had
instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had
forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he
discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft
rearing its aggressive height at the angle of two avenues.
“How she would have hated it!” he murmured.
A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him
like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that
Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures
moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks.
Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly
dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as
though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative
rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery.
Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he
asked for some flowers.
“Anything in the emblematic line?” asked the anaemic man behind the
dripping counter.
Glennard shook his head.
“Just cut flowers? This way, then.” The florist unlocked a glass door
and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the
scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were
white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the
long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an
odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned
in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of
Margaret Aubyn’s nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner
vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms....
The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.