"We do our best. I haven't been here long, you know, but I do my best. And a man can't do more, now can he?"
"No" I said, "he can't."
He put his head on one side, and looked at a tombstone near by: it was tilted over to one side, blackened by the soot to a dirty yellow colour, the plaster peeling off. There was one dirty scraggy evergreen growing on the grave. There was a text on the stone, I remember, something about the righteous nourishing like the bay-tree.
"Of course one can't do everything. Look at that now. Some people don't do anything, never come near the place, don't spend a penny on their graves. Then of course they go like that. It will get worse and worse, for we only bury reserves here now. Sometimes it ain't anyone's fault: families die out, the graves are forgotten. It don't look nice, but well, I say, what does it matter after all? When I'm dead, they may chuck me on the dung-hill, for all I care."
He looked down his nose at the rows and rows of dirty white grave-stones, which were under his charge, critically, with an air of hostility, as if they had done him some wrong.
"You don't perhaps believe in a life after death?" I said.
He pushed his hands well down into the pockets of his long overcoat, hugged himself together, and looked up at the yellow sky and dirty yellow houses, looming over the cemetery.
"No I don't," he said with conviction. "It ain't likely. Nobody knows anything about it. It ain't likely, is it?"
"No, but what about the Bible?"
His cold grey eyes looked at me steadily over the gold pince-nez.