I'll send the certificate round.
I suppose you'll communicate with the relatives."
"I don't think there are any," said Philip.
"How about the funeral?"
"Oh, I'll see to that."
Dr. Tyrell gave Philip a glance.
He wondered whether he ought to offer a couple of sovereigns towards it.
He knew nothing of Philip's circumstances; perhaps he could well afford the expense; Philip might think it impertinent if he made any suggestion.
"Well, let me know if there's anything I can do," he said.
Philip and he went out together, parting on the doorstep, and Philip went to a telegraph office in order to send a message to Leonard Upjohn.
Then he went to an undertaker whose shop he passed every day on his way to the hospital.
His attention had been drawn to it often by the three words in silver lettering on a black cloth, which, with two model coffins, adorned the window: Economy, Celerity, Propriety.
They had always diverted him.
The undertaker was a little fat Jew with curly black hair, long and greasy, in black, with a large diamond ring on a podgy finger.
He received Philip with a peculiar manner formed by the mingling of his natural blatancy with the subdued air proper to his calling.
He quickly saw that Philip was very helpless and promised to send round a woman at once to perform the needful offices.
His suggestions for the funeral were very magnificent; and Philip felt ashamed of himself when the undertaker seemed to think his objections mean.
It was horrible to haggle on such a matter, and finally Philip consented to an expensiveness which he could ill afford.
"I quite understand, sir," said the undertaker, "you don't want any show and that—I'm not a believer in ostentation myself, mind you—but you want it done gentlemanly-like.
You leave it to me, I'll do it as cheap as it can be done, 'aving regard to what's right and proper.
I can't say more than that, can I?"
Philip went home to eat his supper, and while he ate the woman came along to lay out the corpse.
Presently a telegram arrived from Leonard Upjohn.
Shocked and grieved beyond measure. Regret cannot come tonight. Dining out. With you early tomorrow. Deepest sympathy. Upjohn.
In a little while the woman knocked at the door of the sitting-room.
"I've done now, sir.
Will you come and look at 'im and see it's all right?"
Philip followed her.
Cronshaw was lying on his back, with his eyes closed and his hands folded piously across his chest.
"You ought by rights to 'ave a few flowers, sir."
"I'll get some tomorrow."
She gave the body a glance of satisfaction.
She had performed her job, and now she rolled down her sleeves, took off her apron, and put on her bonnet.
Philip asked her how much he owed her.
"Well, sir, some give me two and sixpence and some give me five shillings."
Philip was ashamed to give her less than the larger sum.
She thanked him with just so much effusiveness as was seemly in presence of the grief he might be supposed to feel, and left him.
Philip went back into his sitting-room, cleared away the remains of his supper, and sat down to read Walsham's Surgery.
He found it difficult.
He felt singularly nervous.
When there was a sound on the stairs he jumped, and his heart beat violently.
That thing in the adjoining room, which had been a man and now was nothing, frightened him.
The silence seemed alive, as if some mysterious movement were taking place within it; the presence of death weighed upon these rooms, unearthly and terrifying: Philip felt a sudden horror for what had once been his friend.
He tried to force himself to read, but presently pushed away his book in despair.
What troubled him was the absolute futility of the life which had just ended.
It did not matter if Cronshaw was alive or dead.
It would have been just as well if he had never lived.
Philip thought of Cronshaw young; and it needed an effort of imagination to picture him slender, with a springing step, and with hair on his head, buoyant and hopeful.
Philip's rule of life, to follow one's instincts with due regard to the policeman round the corner, had not acted very well there: it was because Cronshaw had done this that he had made such a lamentable failure of existence.
It seemed that the instincts could not be trusted.