He shook his head. “We missed him.”
“Which isn’t surprising. You can’t find him without the aid of a detective or a guide.”
“Then, who ever finds him?”
“No one!—and there is the shame. We accepted the vast labors and the money of our 192 Ambassador to France in locating the remains of America’s first Naval Hero; we sent an Embassy and a warship to bring them back; we received them with honor, orated over them, fired guns over them. And then, when the spectators had departed—assuming they were to be deposited in the crypt of the Chapel—we calmly chucked them away on a couple of trestles, under a stairway in Bancroft Hall, as we would an old broom or a tin can. That’s our way of honoring the only Naval Commander we had in the Revolution. It would have been better, much better, had we left him to rest in the quiet seclusion of his grave in France—lost, save in memory, with the halo of the past and privacy of death around him.”
“And why didn’t we finish the work?” said Croyden. “Why bring him here, with the attendant expense, and then stop, just short of completion? Why didn’t we inter him in the Chapel (though, God save me from burial there), or any place, rather than on trestles under a stairway in a midshipmen’s dormitory?”
“Because the appropriation was exhausted, or because the Act wasn’t worded to include burial, or because the Superintendent didn’t want the bother, or because it was a nuisance to have the remains around—or some other absurd reason. At all events, he is there in the cellar, and he is likely to stay there, till Bancroft Hall is swallowed up by the Bay. The junket to France, the parade, 193 the speeches, the spectacular part are over, so, who cares for the entombment, and the respect due the distinguished dead?”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” he observed, “but it’s hard luck to have one’s bones disturbed, after more than a hundred years of tranquillity, to be conveyed clear across the Atlantic, to be orated over, and sermonized over, and, then, to be flung aside like old junk and forgot. However, we have troubles of our own—I know I have—more real than Paul Jones! He may be glad he’s dead, so he won’t have any to worry over. In fact, it’s a good thing to be dead—one is saved from a heap of worry.”
She looked at him, without replying.
“What’s the use?” he said. “A daily struggle to procure fuel sufficient to keep up the fire.”
“What’s the use of anything! Why not make an end of life, at once?” she asked.