The day was chilly and sprinkled with April showers; the mourners in the first coach (in which was Catherine) insisted on having all the windows closed, until the rain-washed panes were dim with the reek of their breaths. They carried their pocket-handkerchiefs in their hands, and spoke in tremulous murmurs.... The cavalcade swept on, through the dreariest and frowsiest streets in all Bockley, out on to the murky highways where the mud splashes from passing motor-buses reached the tops of the window-panes. Then past the Town Hall, magnificently impeding traffic as they crossed the tram-lines at the Ridgeway corner, on to the outer fringes of the town, where public-houses and tin-missions indulged in melancholy stares at one another across cat-haunted waste land. A slow progress past an avenue of cars at the tram terminus, and at last to the gates of a pretentious but infinitely dismal burial-ground. The latter was owned and run on business lines by a limited liability company, and for many years it had paid twelve per cent, on its ordinary shares. That dying was a profitable industry could be seen from the great gates, opening far back from the road, with their ornate metal-work representing winged angels.
As they left the coaches a shower began. They walked about a quarter of a mile amongst a welter of acrobatic angels, broken columns and miscellaneous statuary; then they reached the grave. The rain plashed dismally on the pile of brown earth by the side, and everybody stood on the brink with a precarious footing on the sodden soil. There was a diminutive Methodist parson with a bad cold, who coughed at every comma in the burial-service and sneezed into the grave at the end of each verse. All around them was the litter of gravediggers’ tools, faded flowers and wreath-skeletons. Catherine thought it by far the most depressing business she had ever come across. Her father scattered a handful of cold, clammy mud on top of the coffin, and everybody (especially the bald-headed men with their hats off) seemed eager to get back to the fetid warmth of the coaches.... So back went the procession, down the long cemetery avenue, with nothing in sight save untidy vistas of unsymmetrical gravestones, back into the steaming coaches, home again through the mud and rain to Kitchener Road. The carriages reeked with the smell of wet kid gloves and damp mackintoshes. In the Bockley High Street they passed a crowd round a street accident. A motor-bus had skidded into a tram-way standard, and there were mud-splashed, white-painted ambulances in attendance. Mr. Weston rubbed the vapour off the window with his hand. “Some poor devil,” he muttered, and there was a whole world of humanity in his voice. And Catherine felt that nothing in death itself was half so terrible as the dismal fuss that people make over it.
When the carriages arrived back at No. 24, Kitchener Road, and everybody went into the house, they found that the fire in the front room had gone out. Half an hour was spent in trying to relight it with damp coal and damp firewood and damp newspaper. Mr. Weston held up the Bockley and District Advertiser to make a draught. The newspaper caught alight and fell back on to the carpet, whereupon Mr. Weston danced a sort of dervish cake-walk to stamp it out. This acrobatic performance exercised a stimulating effect upon the visitors, who became conversational. In a moment of riotous abandon Mr. Weston directed Catherine to run over to the co-operative stores and purchase two small tins of lobster and one large tin of pineapple chunks....
About ten minutes to midnight, when all the mourners had departed, and Catherine was pulling down the blinds in the back bedroom, her father came up and sat down on the end of the bed Unlacing his boots.
“You know, Cathie,” he began, nervously, as if there were something he wished to get off his mind, “this business is so ... so ... so sudden.... That’s what’s the matter with it. It don’t give a chap time to gather his wits.... Last week she was here. Fussing about and rushing round and seemingly in the best of health. And this week—dead an’ buried.... Bit of a shock, isn’t it?”
She did not answer. He continued in a spurt:
“You know there’s a sort of way in which you miss anybody you’ve been used to seeing about the place for years an’ years. Without any ... er ... what people call love, you know, or anything of that sort.... Well, I miss your mother in that way. Quite apart from any other way, I mean.... If she was here now she’d nag at me for not taking my dirty boots off downstairs. It’s funny, but I shall miss all that nagging. I got used to it. I didn’t particularly like it, but things’ll seem pretty dull for a time without it....”
Pause.
“For twenty years I’ve chucked my dirty boots under the sofa downstairs, and wouldn’t have dreamt of bringing them up here.... And now the first night she’s laid to rest I come up here with ’em on without thinkin’ about it....”
He kept on making vague remarks.