ses and markets, tumble-down
shanties, weedy corner lots and "refreshment-houses" that announced
"Lager Beer, Wines and Liquors." At last they came to a region which was
neither country nor city, where the road-houses were still in evidence,
where the glass roofs of greenhouses caught the burning rays of the
sun, where yards filled with marble blocks and half-finished tombstones
appeared, and then they turned into the gates of Winterbourne.
Like the city itself, there was a fashionable district in Winterbourne:
unlike the city, this district remained stationary. There was no soot
here, and if there had been, the dead would not have minded it. They
passed the Prestons and the Parrs; the lots grew smaller, the tombstones
less pretentious; and finally they came to an open grave on a slope
where the trees were still young, and where three men of the cemetery
force lifted the coffin from the hearse--Richard Garvin's pallbearers.
John Hodder might not read the service, but there was none to tell him
that the Gospel of John was not written for this man. He stood an the
grass beside the grave, and a breeze from across the great river near by
stirred the maple leaves above his head. "I am the resurrection and the
life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet
shall he live." Nor was there any canon to forbid the words of Paul:
"It is sown in corruption; it is raised in in corruption; it is sown in
dishonour; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised
in power; it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."
They laid the flowers on the fresh earth, even the white roses, and then
they drove back to the city.
CHAPTER XIV. A SATURDAY AFTERNOON
I
The sight of a certain old gentleman as he walked along the shady
side of Twenty-second Street about two o'clock on a broiling Saturday
afternoon in midsummer was one not easily to be forgotten. A younger
man, tall and vigorous, clad in a thin suit of blue serge, walked by his
side. They were followed by a shouting troop of small boys who overran
the pavements, and some of whom were armed with baseball bats. The big
trolley car was hailed by a dozen dirty little hands.
Even the grumpy passengers were disarmed. The conductor took Mr.
Bentley's bill deprecatingly, as much as to say that the newly organized
Traction Company--just out of the receivers' hands--were the Moloch, not
he, and rang off the fares under protes
|