Part 15

The intimidating superiority was the body under the glass cover of the coffin. It would have been easier in a church. Funerals were much less of a strain in a church and there were several whispers to this effect. Why had Mrs. Gilchrist insisted upon a home funeral? Wasn't it rather old fashioned?

Here in a house death seemed uncomfortably personal. The stage was too small and the mourners were too near something. A curious sympathy that had nothing to do with Mr. Gilchrist took possession of them.

The damp, sweet odor of the flowers, the glimpse of the black coffin, the sound of softly moving feet and whispering tongues were a distressing ensemble. The mourners drifted around and nodded nervously at each other as if they were doing all they could to make the best of a faux pas. Death was a faux pas. A reality without adjectives. A stark, mannerless lie. The family had done its best also. Flowers had been heaped, furniture arranged, the body dressed, a luxurious coffin purchased, great people invited. Nevertheless the waxen-faced one under the glass cover refused to yield its reality. It lay stark and mannerless in the large room--the immemorial skeleton at the feast--repeating the dreadful word "death" with an almost humorous persistency amid the heaped flowers, the carved furniture, the mourners with raised eyebrows. They stood about nervously.

Gilchrist had been a man alive, one of those whose names were known to the world. The name Gilchrist had meant a large building stored with rugs, period furniture, innumerable clerks, departments, delivery trucks, advertisements in newspapers and on fences. The man Gilchrist had been one with whom the dignitaries of the city had shared the intimacy of prestige.

They had said Gilchrist's was a fine store, Gilchrist's was marvelous furniture, Gilchrist was a highly successful business man. Gilchrist was this and that and the other. And here lay Gilchrist, waxen and unscrupulously silent, under a glass cover--a little man with pale sideburns that were now doubly useless, in a black suit and his hands folded over his chest. Here lay Gilchrist dead, and yet the things that had been called Gilchrist still lived. As if immortality was an artifice, superior to life. The furniture store, the furniture, the clerks, trucks, advertisements, the highly successful business--all these still lived. And this was an uncomfortable fact. It embarrassed the mourners. They drifted about with uncertainty.

Like Gilchrist they were men and women whose names were synonymous with great activities. Like Gilchrist, they were considered as the inspiration of these activities. In fact the activities were an artificial symbol of themselves--a sort of photograph of themselves. Yet like Gilchrist, all of them would lie under a glass cover some day and nothing would be changed. The activities that everybody called by their names would still live. As if they had had nothing to do with them. As if these symbols were the life of the city and not the men and women whom they symbolized. Yes, as if these activities which represented their prestige were independent individualities--masks which loaned themselves for a few years to them to wear. And which they took off when they lay stretched under a glass cover. Which they would take off and become anonymous.

For who was this waxen-faced man in the coffin? Nobody knew. They had called him Gilchrist. But Gilchrist was clerks, advertisements, furniture, and business. This man in the coffin was someone else, an irritating impostor that reminded them they were all impostors. Death was a confession everyone must make; an incongruous confession. An ending to something that had no ending. Life and its activities, even the activities that bore the name Gilchrist, went on. Yet Gilchrist had, mysteriously, come to an end. He lay in a coffin while his name in large letters talked to other names in the advertisements of the city.

The camaraderie of prestige was insufficient to remove this embarrassment. A dead man under a glass cover spoke to them slyly. Dinners, even very formal dinners with butlers; cliques, even powerful cliques wielding financial destinies; ambitions, board of directors' meetings, investments and reinvestments, hopes and successes--ah, these were deceptive little excitements that were not a part of life--but an artifice superior to life. For life ended and the little excitements went on. They were the surface immortality in which one conveniently forgot the underlying fact of death.

Alas, death. Alas, waxen-faced men lying silent and mannerless under glass covers. A distasteful faux pas, death. Yet some of the company must weep. Not friends who regretted the everlasting absence of William Gilchrist, but men and women bewildered for a moment by the memory of their own death. Death was a memory since it existed like a foregone conclusion. It was sad to think of all the people who had died, laughing ones, famous ones, adventurous ones whose laughter, fame and adventure seemed somehow a lie now that they were dead.

It was so easy to be dead. Death had come to all who had been, even to more dignified and celebrated ones than they. Alas, death. The sober men and women in the Gilchrist home drifted about nervously. They must weep because for the moment they lay in the coffin with Mr. Gilchrist and because for the moment they walked sadly about mourning visions of their own deaths. And for the moment their tears earned for themselves the regard of their fellow mourners as kind-hearted, sensitive, unselfish souls.

Yet there was something intimate among the company. Despite the embarrassment, a curious spirit of friendliness underlay the scene. Men and women who knew each other only as aloof symbols of prestige, stood together and talked in whispers as if they were talking out of character. Half strangers felt a familiarity toward each other.

Under the stamp of a common emotion and a common embarrassment, the company became for the time a collection of intimates, looking at one another and whispering among themselves as if the event were a truce. This was a funeral. Here was reality. And it was polite to lay aside for an hour the masks, the complexities of artifice by which they baffled and impressed each other.

The Reverend Henry Peyton had arrived and the mourners moved into the spacious library, grateful for a destination. The widow in black with her son and daughter-in-law appeared. The company surveyed them with a thrill of vicarious grief. Poor Mrs. Gilchrist, so strong and competent! It seemed almost impossible that she should lose anything, even something as mortal as a husband. She was so fixed and determined. Even now there was something sternly competent about her grief. It was hidden under a black veil. There was nothing to be seen of it but a black veil and a black dress and a pair of wrinkled little hands fumbling with themselves. Poor Mrs. Gilchrist. People had forgotten she was a woman. They felt slightly ashamed as they glanced at her now, as if they were intruding upon a secret. But she had invited them.

A suppressed "Ah!" of sympathy murmured through the room. The minister's words began and a determined hush followed.

Basine sitting in a corner of the room with his mother had spent an uncomfortable hour waiting for the services. He had looked at the body and come away depressed. His quick eyes had observed the company and noted with a concealed smile the manner in which lesser dignitaries were making hay while the tears poured. They were utilizing the camaraderie of prestige and the intimacy of a common emotion to impress themselves upon the greater dignitaries. Women of dubious social standing gravitated as if by general accident toward women of solid social standing and exchanged whispered condolences with them. Men of lesser financial ratings were edging toward leaders of finance and engaging them in dolorous conversations.

Under the depression and gentle bewilderment, the everlasting business of inferior pursuing superior and superior increasing his superiority by resisting pursuit, was going on. The death of poor Gilchrist seemed to Basine, for a few minutes, chiefly important as an opportunity by which lesser mourners were introducing themselves to the attention of greater mourners.

Basine's eyes noticed another undercurrent. He had himself influenced Fanny to prevail upon Mrs. Gilchrist to invite a number of politicians to the funeral. He had furnished the names carefully, telling Fanny that these were men high in power who had been friends of Mr. Gilchrist. The widow, through her secretary, had asked ten of the list to honor her husband's funeral with their presence. She had chosen ten names most familiar to her, among them men of wealth who were renowned as powers behind the various political thrones of the day. The invitations had served Basine to make a slight but important impression upon the political party leaders.

He had at first felt nervous over Mrs. Gilchrist's selections from his list. She had picked ten men, most of whom were engaged in tenacious political antagonisms. He watched now with surprise as the antagonists gravitated together forming, with a number of financiers, an amiable, dignified group.

"In the presence of death they feel inclined to bury the hatchet," he thought and the idea of large funerals as an asset for establishing political harmony developed in his mind.

He noticed a change in his own attitude toward Aubrey. He had felt for years a distaste for the man and although their relations had always been amicable, this distaste had increased to a point where Basine would have felt a relief at the man's death. He could never tell himself why he disliked Aubrey. But the aversion was of long standing. "I don't like his looks," he would grin to himself.

Now, watching him take his seat beside his mother, Aubrey became somehow human and Basine felt he understood the man for the first time. Beneath people whose looks you didn't like was always something human. People were all alike, no matter how they strutted or posed. Underneath was a loneliness--a little crippled likeness of themselves--that they carried about with them all the time. Basine would have liked to talk to him and say something like, "Sorry, old man. I didn't know. I'm sorry...."

The minister had begun. He stood beside the coffin that had been brought in. His opening words startled Basine. A prayer! There was something fantastic in the spectacle of this living man standing beside the dead man and talking aloud to someone who was not in the room. Talking solemnly, intensely to God. As if he had buttonholed Him.

Basine felt irritated by his own emotions. His face assumed a devout air but the emotions and the thoughts which rose from them persisted behind his determined piety. He wanted to immerse himself in the spirit of the man praying. But his eyes played truant. They wandered furtively and observed with uncomfortable precision the bowed head of Henrietta and the spring hat on her head and the heavy-jowled face of her father, belligerently reverent beside her.

The minister's voice shouted. "God, in Heaven ... his heavenly soul ... his heavenly reward...."

Phrases like these detached themselves and lingered in Basine's ears. He had heard them frequently in church. But for the moment they seemed preposterously new. He found himself listening in surprise. Religion had been always an accepted idea to him. Something you believed in as you believed in the necessity of neckties. But though he accepted it and felt a casual faith in an Episcopalian God, it remained an idea apart from reality. He had never given either thought or emotion to religion. Yet he had frequently expended a great deal of mental effort and emotion denouncing people whom he sensed or observed were opposed to religion.

It struck him now as a childish farce--an absurd hocus-pocus. Poor Gilchrist going to heaven and a long-faced man in a black coat speeding his soul heavenward from the Gilchrist library! If there was a God, for whom was all this necessary--the flowers, speeches, prayers? Not for God. But for the people in the room, of course. People crowded in a tiny room taking this opportunity to assure each other that the immensities over their heads, the clouds, stars and spaces were their property.

His iconoclasm increased as if inspired by the length of the minister's harangue. He grew angry with himself and thought of Doris and immediately transferred his anger to her. It was she who was deriding the solemnity of the scene. He had been paying too much attention to her almost insane chatter and things were somewhat undermined in his own soul. Her fault.

The prayer ended and four men came forward and began to sing. Their voices, raised in a hymn, annoyed him instantly. This was too much. What were they singing for? As if their songs would help poor Gilchrist mount from the library into heaven. The entire scene, the bowed heads, sad faces, elaborate coffin; the flowers, the worthy reverend and the singers came to his mind as something terribly unconvincing. Futile, that was it. Children making an unconvincing pretense.

He tried to blot out his thinking and fastened his will upon thoughts that might make him sad, properly sad and believing. What if Henrietta should die.... Henrietta dead. Henrietta gone forever. He seized the thought eagerly. It was not what he wanted but there was a relish in thinking it. Sad ... sad ... yes, if his mother should die or somebody dear to him. Who? Ruth. Ah, what if it were Ruth in the coffin. Instead of anybody else. He would feel differently then. Her beautiful face white as Gilchrist's and her arms still. Her fingers rigid. Ruth dead....

This made him sad but it took his mind entirely from the scene. He forgot for moments that Gilchrist was dead and this was a funeral. The reality returned, however, with an increased vividness to its absurdity. The music of the hymn rose with embarrassing frankness.... Poor little people gathered in a room going through a hocus-pocus to convince themselves that there was a heaven where they would live forever after the misfortune of death. Like children playing with dolls and pretending.... But how did he happen to be thinking like that? Did he believe there was no God, no heaven, no after life?

No, he believed in all that firmly. Of course, one must believe. The self-questioning had shocked him back into a state of grace. Yes, he believed firmly and bowed his head to the hymn that was ending.

During the rest of the services he was inwardly silent. The scene appeared to have slipped into focus again. The minister seemed no longer a symbol of some childish hocus-pocus but an ambassador of God--a stern man, closely in touch with the Mysteries. And there was something awesome in the room. There was something awesome about the coffin and the flowers and the voices of the singers trailing into an Amen. It was God. Yes, a great all powerful Being to whose hands mankind returned.

The discomfort of doubt left Basine and he felt himself again an integral part of something vaster than himself. His thought re-entered the idea of religion and a sense of peace filled him. He said Amen twice and looked with mute, believing eyes at the black coffin.

The mourners were following the six silk-hatted pall bearers into the street. A drizzle over the pavements. A long line of motors, chauffeurs waiting, looking as aloof and aristocratic in their servitude as their employers.

Basine found himself beside Milton Ware, one of the big traction officials of the city. A grey-haired man with a well-preserved face stamped with certainties and stern affabilities. Basine thought casually that Ware had seemed rather friendly. He had come over to exchange remarks several times while waiting for the services to begin. On the curb Basine looked around for Henrietta. Judge Smith had brought his machine and they were to drive to the cemetery together.

"Are you with anyone?" Ware asked quietly.

"Yes, I'm looking for my party," Basine answered. He spied the judge and Henrietta crowded into their car. Several others had entered with them. Ware followed his eye.

"That looks rather full," he suggested. "If you don't mind, would you take a place in my machine."

Basine nodded. "Thank you. I'll just talk to them a minute then."

He returned from his father-in-law's automobile and entered with Ware. The chauffeur started off and Basine leaned back in his seat. He wondered at Ware's hospitality. The man was one of the outstanding powers of the city, incredibly ramified through banks and corporations and public utilities. He wondered what his connection with Gilchrist had been. The traction baron--a title given him by the newspapers--sat in silence beside him as the procession got under way. Basine's curiosity began to answer itself. He found himself vaguely on his guard.

"I hadn't intended going to the cemetery," Ware announced after they had been riding a few minutes. "I don't believe much in such demonstrations."

"Neither do I," Basine answered. He was wondering if it were possible to escape his duty to the family. There was such a crowd he might not be missed at the grave.

"Would you mind if we turned out at one of these streets and drove to the club," Ware asked deferentially.

Basine hesitated. He had noticed the invitation in the remark. Ware, whom he had only met once before, was inviting him to the club. Why? A desire to attach himself to Ware abruptly edited his doubts concerning the propriety of his absence.

"I'd just as soon," he answered. The chauffeur was given directions. The remainder of the ride was passed in silence.

"I thought we might have lunch here," Ware explained as they seated themselves in front of a window overlooking the boulevard. It was raining. The empty street gleamed and darkened with rain.

"Most of the forenoon is gone anyway," Ware added. "Have you an engagement?"

"Thanks, I haven't," Basine answered. They sat sipping at highballs a servant had brought. Basine watched the rain and a figure scurrying past below the window. About this time they were lowering Gilchrist into the ground. No one would ever see his face again.

"Pretty sad about Gilchrist," Ware murmured as if aware of his thought.

Basine's attention returned to the traction baron. The man wanted something. Or why should he seek him out? An anger came into his mind. Who was this man Ware that he could pick him up and cart him to a club and buy him a highball--and expect to impress him, Basine? And for what reason? The man wanted something.

The idea had become a conviction. He sensed it now through the memories of the morning. Ware had led up to it dexterously. A nod at first. Later a few remarks about the weather. Finally an invitation to ride with him to the cemetery. Ware had never intended going there. That had been a ruse to--kidnap him. Basine frowned. Well, he was kidnapped. And he would find out why. Find out directly.

Ware was looking at him with a smile. Basine saw something in the smile that increased his anger. A sudden wave of emotion, as if he were going to strike the man, propelled his thoughts out of him. He heard himself talking in a precise, indignant voice and regretted it at once. But the words continued:

"You're a rather busy man, Mr. Ware. And so am I. What did you want to ask me?"

Ware nodded slowly and thrust out his lower lip.

"Exactly," he murmured. "I wanted to speak to you about something."

"Well...." He paused on the word but Ware remained silent. He would have liked to out-silence the traction official but after a pause, a nervousness possessed him. "Well, let's begin now," he said. "What is it you want?"

He felt the crudity of his question and winced inwardly. But ... the thing was said. He would fellow through in that tone, then. He tightened his features and leaned back in his chair, his eyes deliberately on the face of his host. He had embarrassed Ware. He could sense that through the man's poise. His poise was only a stall. Well and good. There was nothing for him, Basine, to be embarrassed about. He felt elated after all with the way he had handled the thing.

"I want to talk to you about a rather delicate matter," Ware began. Basine nodded. He held the trumps. He had only to sit back and this traction baron would begin to mumble, his celebrated poise would begin to disintegrate.

"I'll be as direct as you, Judge," he continued. "I see that you don't like beating around the bush. Neither do I. But I didn't know. As I said, the thing is a rather delicate matter and I want you to take my word for it, that whatever you say in way of reply will in no way change my opinion of you. It's a thing to be said and then forgotten, if necessary, by both of us. Do you agree?"

Basine nodded.

"It's about the Hill case," Ware lowered his voice.

"The Hill case?" Basine stared.

"On your calendar, Judge. The violinist suing for $50,000. Hurt by falling off a street car. I thought you knew the case."

"I remember it now, Mr. Ware."

"Well, the man hasn't a case at all. But it's a jury trial and, of course, juries sometimes think out things in an odd way. Now what I'm getting at is this. This particular suit doesn't disturb us much. But the anti-traction press is going to give it a great deal of publicity. And what we're interested in is the effect of the suit. You understand? The town is full of cranks and schemers always trying to get rich by suing some big utility corporation. And if this man Hill wins his case, why it'll mean another hundred cases all as preposterous as his on our hands. Do you follow me?"

Basine nodded.

"I told you it was a rather delicate subject," Ware smiled. "And I would never have thought of broaching it if I wasn't sure you would look at it in the light it's offered, you understand? I don't mean I'm asking a judge to do anything outside the facts or to go out of his way to hand us anything. That's dishonest and absurd. The thing is, as you'll see for yourself when the case starts, that this man Hill is an impostor trying to hold us up. We'll prove that to your entire satisfaction. What I'm getting at is that there's the jury and you know the attitude of juries these days toward corporations. They hold against us regardless of evidence. Now what I'm after is to see we get a fair trial and it lies in your province to help us."

Basine leaned forward and spoke with difficulty. His anger had grown in him.

"What is it you want me to do?" he asked.

Ware smiled disarmingly.

"Nothing at all, Judge, that you wouldn't have done of your own volition. I want you, if you are convinced such a course is a just one, to take the case from the jury and throw it out of court. Now, wait a minute. I see you're angry and, as I said, the matter in a way is rather delicate to talk about. But come, I'll say frankly, I'm interested in you. We need men like you. Quick, intelligent and able to see their way. The progress of the city depends upon such men. You know Jennings?"

"Your attorney."

"Yes, in full charge of our legal department. There's another case for you of an intelligent, quick-witted man, scrupulously honest but not an ass. Six years ago Jennings was a judge on the municipal bench. Wasted ... utterly wasted ... today--"

Basine interrupted, his voice harshened.

"An analogy. I see. Thanks."

He stood up. Ware reached out his hand.

"I don't think you quite understand me," he murmured.

"Perfectly," Basine answered. "And I've given my word that whatever I understood would be forgotten."