... “A little truth. For God’s sake, now, a little truth to season all these facts. Else they’ll stink in your flesh, John Mark: they’ll rot your soul, John Mark. A little truth.”
How strange that I lie bearably in bed! Pleasantly. That ankle is a blessing. No fracture. I diagnose a strain and a bruise. A fortnight’s rest will doctor it as well as any doctor. A fortnight’s meditation will doctor my mind and my soul. For they are sore in need of healing. —Truth, to ease the chaos of these maddening facts: truth that is harmony like this which holds my body, all of its stress and thrust, to the balance of health!
But first there is the funeral to go to.
The ankle’s an excuse to free you of that. No: be borne in your royal litter, wounded but heir to half a million dollars: borne to the laying away of your slain parents. That is a privilege too rarely human to be missed by you. Such a son, such loving parents: and the muffled friends, looking with veiled envy at your devotion.
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THE day of the funeral was a bright laughter. Sun sent its golden peals across the sky that warmed and opened like a wanton girl. The stones of the city as we passed were a half liquid substance, laved and entered and absorbed by the May morning. Asphalt, men and women drab-clothed walking, the strew of wagons and the loom of houses ... all was a texture of imprisoned light. I felt how all this various matter was a whirl, crystallized and bound, of luminous electrons: how all of it was one with the sun’s steep pour and with the sudden jet of my own mind merging with it.
The cemetery was a smile of lawn in which the monuments stood like polished teeth. All of the countryside was a response in laughter to the frolicsome couple of the sun and sky.
We stood beside the Minister. The marble vault opened its bronze grille and as the coffins slid into their place, a Christian word nodded the act to gayety. Were not the coffins polished? Was not the vault a little elegant smile echoing the brash laughter of the skies? And the solemnity of the group who with bared heads watched the bodies of my parents slide away, was it not thrust across the wanton mood of the morning like a comic strip? Eyes dwelt a moment upon me and read there the conventional bereavement. A subtle counterpoint stirred underneath the elemental laughter. All of us seemed little whirls of dust modeled by a momentary wind: pompously we were acting our droll scene for the gods whose straighter moods shone in the sun and the earth, and who used us for their more intricate and secret humors.
I have lost my mother and my father. How, here, in this laughing farce of Spring, can I dwell with my sorrow? Here all of us are dwarfed too cruelly. Almost, I expected as we walked away, to see the Minister fling off his mask and motley, to see the mourners caper in relief as at a curtain’s drop: see all of us and the dead bodies of my parents, too, and their so polished coffins, take on the ease of supers when the show is done: pocket their pay and pass....