Meantime I had procured a cardboard box, and from Slam’s hat the kitten passed into its coffin. The coffin was put on our toboggan—for Slam and I were going to lunch out—and the catafalque left the hotel.
Slam put her hand into mine—a compliment that only children can pay—and we debated about the cemetery. I personally inclined to the riverbed at the bottom of the valley, but Slam would have none of it.
‘Up above,’ she said, ‘it is cleaner;’ and, though it was all pretty clean, I assented. ‘Then we can eat our lunch and toboggan down,’ she added. This was common-sense; to walk up after the funeral would be depressing; we might recover our lightness of spirit if we left the tobogganing till afterwards.
On the way up, through the village, that is, and towards the glacier, the talk turned on serious subjects. Did I believe that animals would have a resurrection? Why did God make them if they were just to die and be finished? Again, if they were to have a resurrection, was it not proper to bury them properly? Thus we arrived at the cemetery. Four pine-trees stood there, with snow drifted high between them; the benediction of the sun hallowed the place; never had anyone a more virgin tomb. We scooped out the snow down to soil-level, and dropped the box into the excavation. Then with pious hands we covered it up, and on the top of the cairn planted sprigs taken from the pines.
‘And now I will say my prayers,’ said Slam.
She knelt down in the snow, and, even with the fear of her nurse before my eyes, I could say nothing to dissuade her, but knelt by her and uncovered my head. And then Slam said the Lord’s Prayer, and asked that she might be a good girl always, and prayed that God might bless her father and mother and nurse and me.
Do you know what it is to be remembered in the prayers of a child? Then she paused: ‘and the kitten,’ she added. And I said ‘Amen.’
So there the kitten lies, between the sky and the beautiful snow-clad earth. Pines whisper about it, and the Wetterhorn and Eiger watch over its resting-place. And Slam said her prayers there.
What follows? As far as I am concerned, this: I believe that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, and that there will be one day a great healing and comforting. And when on that day, mysteriously, unintelligibly, that little body, which meantime has fed the grasses and the alpine flowers of the place, comes to itself and is alive again, I believe that a happy little kitten will stand between those four pine-trees, lost no longer. And Slam and I will recognise it. And the kitten—who knows?—will recognise us, and Slam will say again, in the phrase that is so often on her lips: