k, and they did not come back in time. He
became very excited on the third day, and sent a number of increasingly
fiery telegrams without any result whatever, and succumbed next morning
with a very ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources
of his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a
particularly thin and shiny black cloth--for evidently his dress-suit
dated from adolescent and slenderer days--straddle like the Colossus
of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's funeral. Moreover, I was
inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first
silk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, by a deep mourning band.

I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneled
housekeeper's room and the touch of oddness about it that she was not
there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black, and I seem
to recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that arose out of their
focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the new silk hat came and went
and came again in my emotional chaos. Then something comes out clear and
sorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base
and inconsequent things, and once again I walk before all the other
mourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard
path to her grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully
and unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.

"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die."

Never die! The day was a high and glorious morning in spring, and all
the trees were budding and bursting into green. Everywhere there were
blossoms and flowers; the pear trees and cherry trees in the sexton's
garden were sunlit snow, there were nodding daffodils and early tulips
in the graveyard beds, great multitudes of daisies, and everywhere
the birds seemed singing. And in the middle was the brown coffin end,
tilting on men's shoulders and half occluded by the vicar's Oxford hood.

And so we came to my mother's waiting grave.

For a time I was very observant, watching the coffin lowered, hearing
the words of the ritual. It seemed a very curious business altogether.

Suddenly as the service drew to its end, I felt something had still
to be said which had not been said, realised that she had withdrawn
in silence, neither forgiving me nor hearing