I never saw anybody so wonderfully attired. He was all in black, including his gloves and his stick, and above his small neat buttoned boots when he sat down I saw a black sock. That may only have been accidental, but no accident would account for the fact that his cuffs had a neat black border about half an inch wide. I wondered if he had blacked himself all over like the enthusiastic impersonator of Othello.
He had ventured to intrude on our grief, but only for a moment. Here Helen dropped her handkerchief, and they both bent down to pick it up and knocked their heads together, and I almost thought I heard a little stifled gasp from behind the piano. But Mr. Holmes had received no notice of the funeral, which he had understood was to be to-day, and did not know if we wished it to be quite private; if not, he would esteem it a privilege to be allowed to pay his last respects. And here little Mr. Holmes gave a great gulp, and could not get on.
‘I did like him so much,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Two. Thank you, I can let myself out!’
And he walked away on tiptoe, as if it was most important not to make a noise.
It was one of those sparkling February days, sunny and windless, and the air was full of the chirruping of birds. There was a moment’s pause at the gate of the churchyard, a moment’s silence. Inside the church the organ ceased; then came great simple words:
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’
MARCH
HELEN and I have a failing, though you may not have thought that such a thing was possible. It is a foolish weakness for old bits of rubbish. We can neither of us without anguish and unutterable rendings bear to throw old and useless things away. The weakness has to be got over sometimes, but we keep putting the work of destruction off, just as one puts off a visit to the dentist, with the result that when it comes to pass we find that it would have been far better to have done it long ago. However, if we did not occasionally tear things up, and throw things away, the house would become uninhabitable, so this morning we vowed to each other to spend the hours till lunch in the work of destruction. Our rubbish collects chiefly in the room that is called mine, where she has a knee-hole table with nine drawers. She opened these one after the other. They were all full, and despair seized her.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Here are nine drawers all quite full of heart’s blood. O Jack, look!’
And she brought across to me a photograph I had taken of Legs jumping the lawn-tennis net. He was sitting in the air apparently in an easy attitude. One knee seemed crossed over the other, and his mouth was wide open.