XXXII
At daybreak smoke was seen curling out of one of the cold mill stacks. Everybody in New Damascus knew that Enoch’s body was to be burned in a puddling furnace.
“There he goes!” one said. “There goes old Enoch now.”
“Not yet,” said another. “Take a hotter fire than that. Don’t you see it’s just started. That’s his puddler son-in-law getting it ready for him.”
It takes eight or ten hours, starting with it cold, to get the maw of a puddling furnace white hot. In this case it would take even longer since Thane had it all to do alone and would be unable to stoke the fire steadily. There were other duties. Simple obsequies would take place at the mansion in the afternoon. That was all the public was permitted to know. Only Thane and Agnes knew at what hour the cremation would begin. The point of keeping it secret was obvious.
All day long people watched the smoke with fascinated horror. Crowds gathered on the mountainside and at points overlooking the mill to witness this weird translation of the symbol that was Enoch,—symbol of iron, symbol of indestructibility. There were many who believed he would not burn.
After the funeral services had taken place at the mansion interest in the smoke became intense. Changes in its color or density or in the way it twisted out of the top of the stack evoked exclamations of horrendous wonder and cries of “Look! Look! That’s the image of him. That’s Enoch going up. Don’t you see him?” Then news would come, seemingly by a telepathic impulse, that that had been only the son-in-law poking up the fire; the body was still at the mansion. Again it would be rumored that a previous rumor was positively true. The remains had been got into the mill unobserved. Everybody had been fooled. Enoch had got the last laugh. He had been burning up for more than an hour and had already very largely vanished into the sky.... So the whole afternoon and the early evening passed.
An hour after sunset the stable-man drove a spring wagon to the Enoch portal of the Gib mansion. He tied the horse to the ring in the hand of the ironboy hitching post and went indoors. Presently the front door swung open. Thane, the gardener and the stable-man appeared bearing the coffin. They slid it into the bed of the wagon over the tailboard. Agnes followed with a black drape. Thane covered the coffin with it. Then he helped Agnes up over the high front wheel, took the lines from the stable-man, got up beside her, and they drove away at a walk.
At the entrance to the mill yard Agnes held the lines while Thane got down to unlock the gate. A number of people were idly gathered there in separate knots, pretending to be non-existent. News of the body’s arrival would travel fast. That couldn’t be helped. What Thane had counted on was that darkness would cheat the eye of morbidity. But he had forgotten the moon; it was full and coming up. The whorl of smoke rising from the stack looked even more ghost-like by moonlight than in daytime and the watchers, now sure of their spectacle and of Enoch’s presence in the smoke, were more gruesomely thrilled than they had hoped to be.