Yet this camaraderie which usually heightened the poise of such gatherings was unable to remove the embarrassment of the company. They spoke in whispers and remained outsiders, as if the Gilchrists were a family of intimidating superiors in whose presence one didn't quite know what to do with one's arms or feet or what to say or just how to make one's features look.
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.