Aunt Hester came with food on a tray, and urged her to try to eat something, just a morsel, just a sip. What was the good of it all? And the voice of Aunt Hester stayed with her interpolating dull remarks about funerals, trains, Penlington, nice to be home again, poor dear mother, make a friend of Jesus, try not to brood, into Sheila’s busy thought. But Sheila pushed them all from her. She was eager to brood. Without brooding, life was empty: a dry husk. She surrendered herself now, opened her heart to that host of memories: they tumbled in, a looting rabble. She lived over and over again her days with Helena: her thought sped through the years ever more quickly, until in a sickening rush it reached the dead wall of the present. Helena was dead, God had stupidly killed her. And would they have to try to sing a hymn about—what was it?—each within his narrow bed, safe home at last, Jesu’s breast, blend the living with the dead.... Aunt Hester was back again, urging her to cry. ‘You do the crying, aunt.’ Had she said that or only thought it? She wished Aunt Hester would go away with her talk of the kind nurse, just a sip or two, quite a peaceful passing dear, try to pray, home again soon, take her with us. What was the sense in saying ‘take her with us’ when Helena was dead? There was nothing to take home. There was nothing to take home except what was in the white room, number seventeen. They’d put it in a box ... not Helena; Helena was gone away ... Sheila was jealous of anything that came to thrust itself between her and her memories; but she could not still the almost febrile activity of her aching brain: her random thoughts danced on dizzily over the bottomless black pit.
Back in the house at Penlington. A locked room now, with It, shut up in a shiny coffin, on trestles. And to-day, at noon, It was to be taken away.
Noon. The long-tailed black horses trampled on Sheila’s heart. Six men entered the house and mounted the stairs—tramp, tramp, tramp—and stopped.... They returned more slowly, their breathing more noisy, their footsteps less regular. Sheila turned her face from the window lest she should find horror made visible.
She stood in the stuffy room, waiting for the others to come downstairs. Although the windows were wide open the atmosphere was stiflingly hot. The drowsy hum in which all summer sounds were merged floated in oppressively, and the clock’s ticking was a burden.
She was very uncomfortable and wretched in her black clothes; her gloved hands perspired. She caught sight, through the trees in the garden, of the waiting carriage.... Why were all these things necessary?
Uncle Peter came downstairs, followed by Aunt Hester and a school chum of Helena’s. Other draped figures came, including a strange girl-cousin with her husband; but none was of the slightest consequence.
In the crawling carriage now; and idiot birds were singing happily outside. Sunshine, dusty roads, blue cloudless sky, hot air, silly singing birds, the window-fittings in the carriage, Uncle Peter with his expanse of waistcoat and great gold chain and perspiring face, the split in the third finger of her black glove, the ill-repressed sniffling of the cousin, a scratch in the paint over Uncle Peter’s head, the houses and hedges moving slowly past them, people at the side of the road with raised hats, a team of cricketers in a distant field and the gleam of their white flannels in the sunlight: of all these things she was conscious, and of the black pit, Helena dead, and the slow miserable rumble of wheels.
She wondered why God would not speak to her. A new hope flickered. She would listen for His voice, that still small voice in the soul. But the only voice she heard, whether within or without, was Uncle Peter’s. ‘It really is hot,’ he said conversationally, as they got out of the carriage.
And now added to the horror and the heat was the sight of the coffin being borne into that squat evil building, that house of death, the cemetery chapel, and, presently, a dull droning voice in melancholy monotone: