Set in motion by unseen hands the coffin went gliding towards the furnace doors which opened to receive it. There was a deep roar, a sound like a mighty rushing wind, an elemental and chaotic sound....
Life is a faint dispersed film upon one little planet, but flames roar like this and great winds rush and whirl, out to the remotest star in the unfathomable depths of space. That deep disorderly tumult is the true voice of lifeless matter, not of dead matter, for what has never lived cannot be dead, but of lifeless matter, outside of and beneath and beyond life.
Everyone in the chapel seemed still and bowed and hushed and dwarfed to minute dimensions until the furnace doors had closed again upon that soulless devouring clamour.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
May at Udimore
§ 1
BOBBY forgot that glimpse of the elemental powers that the furnace doors had given him altogether, for such things do not remain naturally in the mind. They inconvenience life. But the voice of the clergyman hustling the arguments of St. Paul along, and the scene in the Crematorium Chapel with the little coffin waiting to be launched into eternity and the few still black mourners dotted among the yellow benches came back to him very vividly when Paul Lambone began to quote and twist those familiar sentences about the contrast between the corruptible and the incorruptible and expand a fantastic philosophy of his own. Bobby had always intended to read that funeral service over again slowly and judicially, but he had never done so and he regretted it now very much. It left him—and Paul of Tarsus—at the mercy of Paul Lambone, and he knew that Paul Lambone loved ingenious slight misquotations.
It was a very warm, serenely still May evening, and Lambone’s party sat after dinner in the twilight, some just inside the house and some on deck-chairs upon the terrace. They looked out over the marsh and over the still sea. The sky was like the inside of a deep blue globe on which an ever increasing multitude of starry midges was alighting, and Rye and Winchelsea crouched low beneath it, black low lumps with a street light and a window or so showing minutely. Receding out to sea was a liner quite brightly lit. With a swift steadiness the beam of the nearer lighthouse swept the distant flats, came near, lit the faces of the talkers, lit the room, called a church tower and a group of trees into existence and dropped them back into the darkness and forgot about them and passed on. And then presently it was coming again, a thin white streak of light hurrying far away across the levels.
When one’s attention wandered from the talk one became aware of an abundance of nightingales. They were nightingales newly come from the south. One or it might be two were in the trees close at hand; others remoter wove a gauze curtain of faint sweet sounds over the visible universe.
Bobby sat on the step between the room and the terrace with his back against a pillar and with his empty coffee-cup beside him. He had put himself there by the feet of Christina Alberta, who was deep in a big arm-chair and very still. Her face was dim except when her cigarette glowed and showed a red-lit unfamiliar face. And yet that afternoon she had been the most familiar thing in the world to him; she had kissed him and pulled his ears and he had kissed her bare shoulders and clasped her in his arms. Devizes too was silent and preoccupied. He sat over against Christina Alberta on the other side of the opening of the room; and he was so much in the twilight that except when the lighthouse beam lit his face, only his shining shoes and socks were clearly visible to Bobby. There had been times when Bobby had thought that Devizes was in love with Christina Alberta, and he had a vague inexplicable feeling that to some extent she was or had been in love with Devizes. He had a sense of unfathomed deeps in their relationship, but he did not know where these deeps lay. If Christina Alberta loved Devizes she would have said so. Bobby knew of no reason why she should not. But to-day she had hugged and kissed Bobby so that it was impossible to believe she loved anyone else.
Yet in the last three or four months she had gone about with Devizes a lot; Bobby had seen her mind responding and changing with her talks with this man. She used to quote him, and she would say things exactly like the things he said. It had been a great inconvenience and trial to Bobby, this preoccupation. And then suddenly he found Devizes wasn’t the lover at all, never could have been a lover. That day she had proved that up to the hilt. And now in a state between pride and servitude Bobby sat at her feet. He sat at her feet and close to her; Devizes in the darkness was remote, a full three yards away.