He became moodily serious rapidly.
“The best people in this town are church members,” he said earnestly.
“It’s a fine thing.”
“Why?” said Eugene, with an idle curiosity.
“Because,” said George Graves, “you get to know all the people who are worth a damn.”
Worth being damned, he thought quickly.
A quaint idea.
“It helps you in a business way.
They come to know you and respect you.
You won’t get far in this town, ‘Gene, without them.
It pays,” he added devoutly, “to be a Christian.”
“Yes,” Eugene agreed seriously, “you’re right.”
To walk together to the kirk, with a goodly company.
He thought sadly of his lost sobriety, and of how once, lonely, he had walked the decent lanes of God’s Scotch town.
Unbidden they came again to haunt his memory, the shaven faces of good tradesmen, each leading the well washed kingdom of his home in its obedient ritual the lean hushed smiles of worship, the chained passion of devotion, as they implored God’s love upon their ventures, or delivered their virgin daughters into the holy barter of marriage.
And from even deeper adyts of his brain there swam up slowly to the shores of his old hunger the great fish whose names he scarcely knew — whose names, garnered with blind toil from a thousand books, from Augustine, himself a name, to Jeremy Taylor, the English metaphysician, were brief evocations of scalded light, electric, phosphorescent, illuminating by their magic connotations the vast far depths of ritual and religion: They came — Bartholomew, Hilarius, Chrysostomos, Polycarp, Anthony, Jerome, and the forty martyrs of Cappadocia who walked the waves — coiled like their own green shadows for a moment, and were gone.
“Besides,” said George Graves, “a man ought to go anyway.
Honesty’s the best policy.”
Across the street, on the second floor of a small brick three-story building that housed several members of the legal, medical, surgical, and dental professions, Dr.
H.
M. Smathers pumped vigorously with his right foot, took a wad of cotton from his assistant, Miss Lola Bruce, and thrusting it securely into the jaw of the unseen patient, bent his fashionable bald head intently.
A tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains, and revealed him, white-jacketed, competent, drill in hand.
“Do you feel that?” he said tenderly.
“Wrogd gdo gurk!”
“Spit!”
With thee conversing, I forget all time.
“I suppose,” said George Graves thoughtfully, “the gold they use in people’s teeth is worth a lot of money.”
“Yes,” said Eugene, finding the idea attractive, “if only one person in ten has gold fillings that would be ten million in the United States alone.
You can figure on five dollars’ worth each, can’t you?”
“Easy!” said George Graves.
“More than that.”
He brooded lusciously a moment.
“That’s a lot of money,” he said.
In the office of the Rogers–Malone Undertaking Establishment the painful family of death was assembled,
“Horse” Hines, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his feet thrust out on the broad window-ledge, chatted lazily with Mr. C.
M. Powell, the suave silent partner.
How sleep the brave, who sink to rest.
Forget not yet.
“There’s good money in undertaking,” said George Graves.
“Mr. Powell’s well off.”
Eugene’s eyes were glued on the lantern face of
“Horse” Hines.
He beat the air with a convulsive arm, and sank his fingers in his throat.
“What’s the matter?” cried George Graves.
“They shall not bury me alive,” he said.
“You can’t tell,” George Graves said gloomily.
“It’s been known to happen.
They’ve dug them up later and found them turned over on their faces.”
Eugene shuddered.
“I think,” he suggested painfully, “they’re supposed to take out your insides when they embalm you.”