The unlit lamp

by Radclyffe Hall

2

It was towards the end of April that Mrs. Ogden chose to visit her dead. The day was kept as a kind of doleful festival, full of gloomy excitement. Joan would unearth decent black for herself, and repair her mother's widow's weeds, which were always resumed for the pilgrimage. Little food would be eaten; there was scant time for meals, and, besides, Mrs. Ogden had ordained a self-imposed fast. Usually the wreaths would not arrive to the minute, and would have to be fetched from the florist's. The fly was invariably late, and the servant would be sent to make inquiries at the livery stable. Perhaps it would rain, in which case waterproofs, goloshes and umbrellas were an additional burden. And to cap all this, it was obviously unseemly to display impatience at such a time, so that immense self-control was added to the strain of already taut nerves.

This April everything seemed to have gone wrong. The florist had arbitrarily raised his prices, and the wreaths were to cost half as much again as they had in previous years. Mrs. Ogden considered his excuses positively impertinent; she had not noticed the late frosts, the abnormally dry weather, or, indeed, any of the disasters to which he attributed the high price of flowers. In the end she had been obliged to give in, but the incident had very much upset her, and she blamed this upset for the cold on her chest which now kept her in bed when she should have visited the cemetery. With the infantile stubbornness of the old she had refused to abandon the idea of going until the last moment; and had even got half through her dressing before Joan could persuade her to go back to bed. This wilfulness of her mother's had delayed everything, and the meals were not ordered or the canary cleaned and fed by the time the fly arrived.

There had been a sharp shower, and Joan found to her dismay that the wreaths, all wet and dripping, had been stood against the wallpaper in the front hall. A little stain of dampness was making its appearance on the carpet as well. She went to fetch a cloth from the scullery. As usual, the window had been left open and on the sill sat a neighbour's cat.

She spoke irritably. "How many times have I told you to shut this window, Rose? That cat comes here after the canary."

She shut the window herself with a bang, and going back to the hall dabbed at the wallpaper, but it was all too evident that the wet marks meant to leave a stain. Sighing, she picked up the wreaths. The damp moss soaked through her gloves. "Oh, damn!" she muttered under her breath, forgetting in her irritation the solemnity of the occasion. She took off her gloves, thrust them into her pocket, and putting the wreaths into the cab got in after them.

"Where to, miss?" inquired the unimaginative driver.

"Cemetery!" snapped Joan.

What a fool the man must be. Did he think she was going to the skating-rink or the pier, with a large grave wreath over each arm?

The cemetery lay a little beyond Shingle Park, and as they bumped along through old Seabourne and out on to the unfinished road Joan glanced casually out of the window. Her head felt heavy and her eyes ached. "Ugly, very ugly!" she murmured absent-mindedly. The rough-cast shanties grinned back defiance. Their walls were so thin that people who had watched their erection declared that daylight had showed through the bricks before the rough cast was applied. Their foundations were non-existent, the woodwork of their front doors shamelessly unseasoned and warping already in the damp sea air. They stood for everything that was dishonest and unsound, and yet not one of them was empty.