Philip was puzzled, and he asked himself what rule of life was there, if that one was useless, and why people acted in one way rather than in another.
They acted according to their emotions, but their emotions might be good or bad; it seemed just a chance whether they led to triumph or disaster.
Life seemed an inextricable confusion.
Men hurried hither and thither, urged by forces they knew not; and the purpose of it all escaped them; they seemed to hurry just for hurrying's sake.
Next morning Leonard Upjohn appeared with a small wreath of laurel.
He was pleased with his idea of crowning the dead poet with this; and attempted, notwithstanding Philip's disapproving silence, to fix it on the bald head; but the wreath fitted grotesquely.
It looked like the brim of a hat worn by a low comedian in a music-hall.
"I'll put it over his heart instead," said Upjohn.
"You've put it on his stomach," remarked Philip.
Upjohn gave a thin smile.
"Only a poet knows where lies a poet's heart," he answered.
They went back into the sitting-room, and Philip told him what arrangements he had made for the funeral.
"I hoped you've spared no expense. I should like the hearse to be followed by a long string of empty coaches, and I should like the horses to wear tall nodding plumes, and there should be a vast number of mutes with long streamers on their hats.
I like the thought of all those empty coaches."
"As the cost of the funeral will apparently fall on me and I'm not over flush just now, I've tried to make it as moderate as possible."
"But, my dear fellow, in that case, why didn't you get him a pauper's funeral?
There would have been something poetic in that.
You have an unerring instinct for mediocrity."
Philip flushed a little, but did not answer; and next day he and Upjohn followed the hearse in the one carriage which Philip had ordered.
Lawson, unable to come, had sent a wreath; and Philip, so that the coffin should not seem too neglected, had bought a couple.
On the way back the coachman whipped up his horses.
Philip was dog-tired and presently went to sleep.
He was awakened by Upjohn's voice.
"It's rather lucky the poems haven't come out yet.
I think we'd better hold them back a bit and I'll write a preface.
I began thinking of it during the drive to the cemetery.
I believe I can do something rather good.
Anyhow I'll start with an article in The Saturday."
Philip did not reply, and there was silence between them.
At last Upjohn said:
"I daresay I'd be wiser not to whittle away my copy.
I think I'll do an article for one of the reviews, and then I can just print it afterwards as a preface."
Philip kept his eye on the monthlies, and a few weeks later it appeared.
The article made something of a stir, and extracts from it were printed in many of the papers.
It was a very good article, vaguely biographical, for no one knew much of Cronshaw's early life, but delicate, tender, and picturesque.
Leonard Upjohn in his intricate style drew graceful little pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter, talking, writing poetry: Cronshaw became a picturesque figure, an English Verlaine; and Leonard Upjohn's coloured phrases took on a tremulous dignity, a more pathetic grandiloquence, as he described the sordid end, the shabby little room in Soho; and, with a reticence which was wholly charming and suggested a much greater generosity than modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made to transport the Poet to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle amid a flowering orchard.
And the lack of sympathy, well-meaning but so tactless, which had taken the poet instead to the vulgar respectability of Kennington!
Leonard Upjohn described Kennington with that restrained humour which a strict adherence to the vocabulary of Sir Thomas Browne necessitated.
With delicate sarcasm he narrated the last weeks, the patience with which Cronshaw bore the well-meaning clumsiness of the young student who had appointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that divine vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings.
Beauty from ashes, he quoted from Isaiah.
It was a triumph of irony for that outcast poet to die amid the trappings of vulgar respectability; it reminded Leonard Upjohn of Christ among the Pharisees, and the analogy gave him opportunity for an exquisite passage.
And then he told how a friend—his good taste did not suffer him more than to hint subtly who the friend was with such gracious fancies—had laid a laurel wreath on the dead poet's heart; and the beautiful dead hands had seemed to rest with a voluptuous passion upon Apollo's leaves, fragrant with the fragrance of art, and more green than jade brought by swart mariners from the manifold, inexplicable China.
And, an admirable contrast, the article ended with a description of the middle-class, ordinary, prosaic funeral of him who should have been buried like a prince or like a pauper.
It was the crowning buffet, the final victory of Philistia over art, beauty, and immaterial things.
Leonard Upjohn had never written anything better.
It was a miracle of charm, grace, and pity.
He printed all Cronshaw's best poems in the course of the article, so that when the volume appeared much of its point was gone; but he advanced his own position a good deal.
He was thenceforth a critic to be reckoned with.
He had seemed before a little aloof; but there was a warm humanity about this article which was infinitely attractive.
LXXXVI