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....