Mrs. Wimble felt the death in another manner. It disconnected her from
life. It cut her off from a network of safe, accustomed grooves.
Something solid she had clung to subsided under ground. A final link with
childhood, youth, and beauty broke. Death has a way of making survivors
older suddenly. Mrs. Wimble now admitted age to herself; wore unsightly
and depressing black; felt sentimental about a big 'p' Past; and ruminated
uneasily about other worlds. Black with her was an admission that an
after-life was at best an open question. It was a lugubrious conventional
act symbolical of selfish grief, a denial of true religious teaching which
should have faith, and therefore joy, as its illuminating principle.
She did not understand the question. She had no answer ready. She said,
'What?'
She referred to the 'lost' at intervals. It did not occur to her that
what is lost is open to recovery. When she said 'lost' she really meant
annihilated. For, though a Christian nominally, and a faithful
church-goer, when she had clothes she considered fit for the Deity to see
her in, her notions of a future state were mental conceptions merely that
contained no real belief. She was not aware that she did not believe, but
this was, of course, the fact. Her father, moreover, had long ago
destroyed the reality of the two after-death places generally accepted,
soon after he had taught her that they both existed. Not wittingly for
his part, nor for her part, consciously. But since 'heavenly' was a term
he used to describe large sales of corn, and 'Go to hell, you idiot' was a
phrase he applied frequently to underlings in yard and office, his
daughter had grown up with less respect for the actuality of these
localities than she might otherwise have had.
And with regard to her love for him--it was not love at all, but a selfish
dependence tempered with mild affection. He was now gone; she missed him.
A prop had sunk, a tie with the distant nursery snapped, the sense of
continuity with the fragrance of early days, of toys, of romance and
Christmas presents was no longer there. Instead of looking backwards--
still possible while a parent lives--she now looked forward into a
muddled, shadowy future that brought depression and low spirits. It was a
subterranean look. She went down under ground into her hole, yet
backwards, still peering with pathetic eagerness into the sunshine of life
that she must leave behind.
Therefore, for her father at any rate, she knew not love. For the one
thing certain and positive about love is that those who feel it _know_,
and to mention loss in the sense of annihilation is but childish
ignorance. There is physical disappearance, separation, going elsewhere,
but these are temporary, another direction, as Joan expressed it.
Love shouts the fact, contemptuous of exact photographic proof.
No mother worth her salt, at any rate, believes that death is final loss.
She has known union; and Love brings, above all, the absolute
consciousness of eternal union. 'Loss,' used of death, is a devil-word
where love is, and as ignorant as 'loss of appetite' when food has become
a portion of the eater. One's self is not separable from its-self.
Love, having absorbed the essentials of what it loves, remains because it
_is_; for ever indivisible; there. The beloved dead step nearer when
their bodies drop aside. 'The dead know where they are, and what they're
doing,' as Joan mentioned. 'It's not for us to worry--in that way.
And they're out of hours and minutes. They probably have no time to come
back and tell us.'
To which Mother's whole attitude replied with an exasperated 'What?
I don't think you know what you mean, child.'
Joan answered in a flash, her face clouding slightly, then breaking into a
happy smile again: 'But, mother, what people think about a thing has
nothing to do with the real meaning.'
'Eh?' said Mother.
'Their opinion doesn't matter.'
Mrs. Wimble bridled a little. She was not yet ready to be taught to fly.
In this airy element she felt unsafe, bewildered, and therefore irritable.
'Then you'll find out later, Joan, that it _does_ matter,' she replied
emphatically with ruffled dignity. 'One can't play fast and loose with
things like that, not in this world, my dear. One must be fixed to
something--somewhere. Life isn't nonsense. And you'll remember later
that I said so.'
Joan peeped at her sideways, as a robin might peep at a barking dog.
A tender and earnest expression lit upon her sparkling little face.
'But life is a vision,' she said with a glow in her voice; 'it begins and
goes on just like that,' and she clicked her fingers in the air.
'If you see it from above, from outside--like a swallow--you know it all
at once like in a dream and vision, and it means everything there is to be
meant. You put in the details afterwards.' She was perched upon the
window-sill again, her long legs dangling. She began to sing her
bird-song.
'There, there,' expostulated Mr. Wimble, who was listening, 'we're not
birds yet, Joan, whatever we're going to be,' but the last seven words
dropped unconsciously into the rhythm of her singing tune. He felt a wind
blow from her into his heart. Mrs. Wimble, however, remained concealed
behind her _World_. She was not actually reading anything, because her
eyes moved too quickly from paragraph to paragraph. But she said nothing
for some moments, and presently she folded the paper with great
deliberation, laying it beside her on the table, and patting it
emphatically.
'Visions are for those that like them,' she announced, moving towards the
door and casting a sideways look of surprise and contempt at her husband
whose silence seemed to favour Joan. 'To my way of thinking, they're
unsettling. What time does Tom come in to-night?'
They discussed Tom for a few moments, and it was remembered that he had a
latch-key and could let himself in, and that therefore they might go to
bed without anxiety. But what Mrs. Wimble said upon this unnecessary
topic meant really: 'You're both too much for me; my hopes are set on
Tom.' She continued her perusal of the _World_ in her room, retiring
shortly afterwards to sleep heavily for nine full hours without a break.