Slightly nauseated, he took his seat with Eliza in the carriage, and tried to think of supper.
The procession moved off briskly to the smooth trotting pull of the velvet rumps.
The mourning women peered out of the closed carriages at the gaping town.
They wept behind their heavy veils, and looked to see if the town was watching.
Behind the world’s great mask of grief, the eyes of the mourners shone through with a terrible and indecent hunger, an unnameable lust.
It was raw October weather — gray and wet.
The service had been short, as a precaution against the pestilence which was everywhere.
The funeral entered the cemetery.
It was a pleasant place, on a hill.
There was a good view of the town.
As the hearse drove up, two men who had been digging the grave, moved off.
The women moaned loudly when they saw the raw open ditch.
Slowly the coffin was lowered onto the bands that crossed the grave.
Again Eugene heard the nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister.
The boy’s mind fumbled at little things.
Horse Hines bent ceremoniously, with a starched crackle of shirt, to throw his handful of dirt into the grave.
“Ashes to ashes —” He reeled and would have fallen in if Gilbert Gant had not held him.
He had been drinking.
“I am the resurrection and the life —” Helen wept constantly, harshly and bitterly.
“He that believeth in me —” The sobs of the women rose to sharp screams as the coffin slid down upon the bands into the earth.
Then the mourners got back into their carriages and were driven briskly away.
There was a fast indecent hurry about their escape.
The long barbarism of burial was at an end.
As they drove away, Eugene peered back through the little glass in the carriage.
The two grave-diggers were already returning to their work.
He watched until the first shovel of dirt had been thrown into the grave.
He saw the raw new graves, the sere long grasses, noted how quickly the mourning wreaths had wilted.
Then he looked at the wet gray sky.
He hoped it would not rain that night.
It was over.
The carriages split away from the procession.
The men dropped off in the town at the newspaper office, the pharmacy, the cigar-store.
The women went home.
No more.
No more.
Night came, the bare swept streets, the gaunt winds.
Helen lay before a fire in Hugh Barton’s home.
She had a bottle of chloroform liniment in her hand.
She brooded morbidly into the fire, reliving the death a hundred times, weeping bitterly and becoming calm again.
“When I think of it, I hate her.
I shall never forget.
And did you hear her?
Did you?
Already she’s begun to pretend how much he loved her.
But you can’t fool me!
I know!
He wouldn’t have her around.
You saw that, didn’t you?
He kept calling for me.
I was the only one he’d let come near him.