“What I really came for this afternoon, my lord,” suddenly broke in Danford, “was to tell you of a very serious reform in our new mode of life—or, at least, death. There are to be no more funerals!”
“What do you mean?”
“You are joking!”
“No more burials?”
“Are we to be thrown away like dogs and cats?”
“How are you going to hand us over to the other side?”
All these indignant questions fell like a volley on Danford the imperturbable, who looked at his pupil.
“We again need your support, my lord. This is the point: without plumes, palls, muffled drums, mutes, how are we to know a Peer’s obsequies from a pauper’s? The chairman of our Committee put it to me in these words yesterday: ‘My dear Dan, try and make Society leaders see that complete privacy in that last and not least important function is of most vital import, if they wish to keep up a certain prestige.’ I promised to mention this to you, and I must add that I am struck myself with the unfitness of a lord of the realm having no better funeral than a vagabond; it seems to me irrelevant.”
“There is the rub of this new state of ours; it has awakened in us the sense of the incongruous,” remarked George Murray. “We used not to be so discriminate, and what struck me most, formerly, was the total lack of humour in people who passed for witty.”
“I cannot tell you,” warmly proceeded Danford, “how shocked I have been at fashionable funerals. There was a time when women did not consider it delicate to attend such functions; it was left to the sterner sex to accompany a beloved parent, whose female relations remained at home to mourn over their loss. But women are not any more to be put aside so easily; they have invaded the smoke-room, banged open the doors of City offices; it is not likely they would remain long away from graveyard excitement. The last I was at, a few weeks before the storm, was a sight, and the pitch of levity to which it rose fairly sickened me. Had I not pinched myself, and rubbed my eyes, I could have believed myself at an At Home. The hostess, a widow, was going from one guest to another, shaking hands with the one, thanking the other for coming; the bereaved daughters skipped over tombs and newly-digged graves to have a word with this one and that one. I instinctively looked round, thinking I might see an improvised buffet in the shade of a mausoleum; I quite expected to see plates of sandwiches handed round, and to hear the jingling of spoons and cups and saucers. Upon my soul, I have no doubt that had not the storm put a stop to Society’s doings, we should have been treated this season to a churchyard tea and a funeral cake. The idea seized hold of me then, and a fit of laughter choked me, when I thought what a good termination to this gruesome farce it would be, were the lamented defunct, on whom they had dropped a shovelful of cut flowers, just to stand up and apostrophise them thus: ‘I say, do not quite forget it is all owing to me that you are having all this fun!’ For I assure you they were entirely oblivious of the poor departed in the excitement of small-talk. Of course all this is at an end practically, and funerals have been quite neglected latterly, for this very good reason that the mourners did not know each other; we are therefore saved from the sad spectacle of levity and callousness which were the distinct traits of our past Society.”