Even this, then? No release, no hope! A lump of earth fell dully from his father's hand. Light would the earth be which her son threw on his mother's bed! He lifted a fragment of clay and released it over the grave. But heavily the sound came, boomed on his ears. Others followed. He became aware of a new refrain in the threnody round him. "Beg for me, Chayah!" "Beg for me, beg the Above One!" they were shouting into the grave as the coffin disappeared below the rising earth. "Beg for me, Chayah!"
He turned away. No more sound was heard of clay on naked wood. Terribly, silently, the level rose. The caretaker had seized the shovel and was piling more earth on the broken surface. Behind a tall white stone with black pillars a little distance away, hidden from the rest, Philip lay for some time, his face on the damp gravel, at last realizing how far from all reach they had placed her, beyond all language, all vision, at the roots of darkness, far from his twitching fingers. It was time for the mourners to descend to the shed for minchah. The chazan was getting restive.
But a few lingered among the stones, coming to read again the inscriptions over the graves of parents, children, friends, all equally dead in the Wheatley cemetery, all under the drizzle in uncomplaining company, all stretched quiet under the levelled clods, which other sons, fathers, friends had heaped on the coffin lids.
When the crowd had descended, he found Reb Monash sitting alone on a form against the wall. The shammos whispered to Philip that he must be seated alongside his father. Head swimming, he obeyed. And now came minchah, the afternoon service. Reb Monash turned up in a Prayer Book the kaddish, the special prayer of the bereaved. The isolation of their two voices frightened him, but he was conscious of a tense determination that no hitch should take place in this concluding ceremony, that she should be left, the tired woman, at rest as soon as they would release her. He uttered the prayer with dead clarity.
Minchah was over. In dull wonder he realized that the shammos had unfastened his father's shoe laces and was unfastening his own. Reb Monash rose weakly and walked across the room and Philip followed. The crowd desultorily made way for them as they moved, their loose laces dragging in the dust. As they were fumbling once more with the tying of their laces, the black figures were flickering through the door into the road.
Who of the living shall stay in the place of the dead? Let the dead hold such converse together as they can! Day speeds to night and night will bring new day. An emptier day for empty eyes in this place and in that, but a new day none the less. Will not fresh waters be flowing from the mountain sources, and other waves hurtle against the shores? It is only the caretaker's dog who prowls unhappily among the graves, wondering dimly at all this to-do. The caretaker himself wipes the clay from his weeding fork and sets to work again, whistling.
There was a self-satisfaction in the clatter of the horses' hoofs as the cabs made their way from the cemetery, an indication that having achieved their part of the day's burden satisfactorily, it was left to the humans they were carrying away to dismiss them as soon as decorum permitted. The drizzle persisted still. The tram-lines glistened evilly mottled among the bricks. With fitful abstraction Philip looked through the window into the drab day. The continuity of houses had not yet begun. Here and there stood a public house at a corner, or two or three houses thrown up in apologetic haste. The cabs overtook a man and a woman walking citywards in the same direction; it seemed that when the hearse came abreast of the man, a natural impulse made him remove his hat. The man stood gaping as the first cab approached, the woman staring curiously. Then suddenly she seized him by the shoulder and pointed a correcting finger towards the procession. She shouted something into his ears—the actual words were drowned in the rattle of wheels. The man gaped more foolishly, and at once, deliberately, replaced his hat. As the man and woman passed from Philip's sight, they were grinning significantly into each other's faces. The lad wondered what it meant. Quickly he was informed. The procession was now riding abreast of a piece of waste ground, sloping greasily up from the roadside level. Against the sky-line, faintly muffled by the intervening rain, Philip saw three or four youths standing, long-legged. He perceived that as soon as they became conscious of the funeral procession their lank immobility had stiffened, and that at once they proceeded to make derisive gestures with their arms and hands. When at last he realized the significance of their gestures he felt as though each had plunged a rusty knife into him. It was the movement he remembered on the part of a band of youths who two or three years ago had assembled outside the Polisher Shool to mock the old Jews entering on their Yom Kippur supplications. It was the movement which had sometimes greeted him in the meaner Gentile parts of Doomington, to an accompaniment of "smoggy van Jew!" Once Higson Junior had stood at the top of the stairs ...
The rain was not too opaque to obscure their lips shaping, nor so dense that he could not hear the scornful implacable words—"Smogs! Look at the smoggy van Jews!"
"God!" he shouted, suddenly starting to his feet. The others calmed him, bade him sit down; to them it seemed a spasmodic outburst of his grief. They had not noticed the gesticulating youths on the clay slope. Or perhaps the youths had not escaped their notice, but having passed this way before, the edge of the experience had been blunted for them by familiarity.
Philip as suddenly subsided, but the blood surged through him, wave after wave, in fierce anger. This, then, was the gentleness of Christ! These the countrymen of Shelley! For these Socialism schemed and poured its hot blood! Oh, God! The skunks! What would it matter if himself they stripped and threw stones at him, sent him bleeding home? Or if they filled with mud the mouths and nostrils of these old men about him? But they had desecrated Death itself, the dolorous quiet majesty of Death! They had desecrated her, the sleeping woman with the folded hands, the lips that should utter no more her sweet calm words, her eyes, sealed under disks of clay, that had been innocent as dawn!