The murmuring group which overflowed the uneven brick pavement to the asphalt was characteristic: women in calico, drudges, women in wrappers, with sleepy, awestricken faces; idlers, men and boys who had run out of the saloons, whose comments were more audible and caustic, and a fringe of children ceaselessly moving on the outskirts. The crowd parted at their approach, and they reached the gate, where a burly policeman, his helmet in his hand, was standing in the morning sunlight mopping his face with a red handkerchief. He greeted Mr. Bentley respectfully, by name, and made way for them to pa.s.s in.
"What is the trouble, Ryan?" Mr. Bentley asked.
"Suicide, sir," the policeman replied. "Jumped off the bridge this morning. A tug picked him up, but he never came to--the strength wasn"t in him. Sure it"s all wore out he was. There was a letter on him, with the home number, so they knew where to fetch him. It"s a sad case, sir, with the woman in there, and the child gone to the hospital not an hour ago."
"You mean Garvin?" Mr. Bentley demanded.
"It"s him I mean, sir."
"We"d like to go in," said Mr. Bentley. "We came to see them."
"You"re welcome, air, and the minister too. It"s only them I"m holdin"
back," and the policeman shook his stick at the people.
Mr. Bentley walked up the steps, and took off his hat as he went through the battered doorway. Hodder followed, with a sense of curious faces staring at them from the thresholds as they pa.s.sed; they reached the upper pa.s.sage, and the room, and paused: the shutters were closed, the little couch where the child had been was empty. On the bed lay a form--covered with a sheet, and beside it a woman kneeling, shaken by sobs, ceaselessly calling a name....
A stout figure, hitherto unperceived, rose from a corner and came silently toward them--Mrs. Breitmann. She beckoned to them, and they followed her into a room on the same floor, where she told them what she knew, heedless of the tears coursing ceaselessly down her cheeks.
It seemed that Mrs. Garvin had had a premonition which she had not wholly confided to the rector. She had believed her husband never would come back; and early in the morning, in spite of all that Mrs. Breitmann could do, had insisted at intervals upon running downstairs and scanning the street. At half past seven Dr. Jarvis had come and himself carried down the child and put him in the back of his automobile. The doctor had had a nurse with him, and had begged the mother to accompany them to the hospital, saying that he would send her back. But she would not be persuaded to leave the house. The doctor could not wait, and had finally gone off with little. d.i.c.ky, leaving a powder with Mrs. Breitmann for the mother. Then she had become uncontrollable.
"Ach, it was terrible!" said the kind woman. "She was crazy, yes--she was not in her mind. I make a little coffee, but she will not touch it.
All those things about her home she would talk of, and how good he was, and how she loved him more again than the child.
"Und then the wheels in the street, and she makes a cry and runs to see--I cannot hold her...."
"It would be well not to disturb her for a while," said Mr. Bentley, seating himself on one of the dilapidated chairs which formed apart of the German woman"s meagre furniture. "I will remain here if you, Mr.
Hodder, will make the necessary arrangements for the funeral. Have you any objections, sir?"
"Not at all," replied the rector, and left the house, the occupants of which had already returned to the daily round of their lives: the rattle of dishes and the noise of voices were heard in the "ci devant" parlour, and on the steps he met the little waif with the pitcher of beer; in the street the boys who had gathered around the ambulance were playing baseball. Hodder glanced up, involuntarily, at the window of the woman he had visited the night before, but it was empty. He hurried along the littered sidewalks to the drug store, where he telephoned an undertaker; and then, as an afterthought, telephoned the hospital. The boy had arrived, and was seemingly no worse for the journey.
All this Hodder performed mechanically. Not until he was returning--not, indeed, until he entered the house did the whiff of its degrading, heated odours bring home to him the tragedy which it held, and he grasped the banister on the stairs. The thought that shook him now was of the c.u.mulative misery of the city, of the world, of which this history on which he had stumbled was but one insignificant incident. But he went on into Mrs. Breitmann"s room, and saw Mr. Bentley still seated where he had left him. The old gentleman looked up at him.
"Mrs. Breitmann and I are agreed, Mr. Hodder, that Mrs. Garvin ought not to remain in there. What do you think?"
"By all means, no," said the rector.
The German woman burst into a soliloquy of sympathy that became incoherent.
"She will not leave him,--nein--she will not come...."
They went, the three of them, to the doorway of the death chamber and stood gazing at the huddled figure of the woman by the bedside. She had ceased to cry out: she was as one grown numb under torture; occasionally a convulsive shudder shook her. But when Mrs. Breitmann touched her, spoke to her, her grief awoke again in all its violence, and it was more by force than persuasion that she was finally removed. Mrs. Breitmann held one arm, Mr. Bentley another, and between them they fairly carried her out, for she was frail indeed.
As for Hodder, something held him back--some dread that he could not at once define. And while he groped for it, he stood staring at the man on the bed, for the hand of love had drawn back the sheet from the face.
The battle was over of this poor weakling against the world; the torments of haunting fear and hate, of drink and despair had triumphed.
The sight of the little group of toys brought up the image of the home in Alder Street as the wife had pictured it. Was it possible that this man, who had gone alone to the bridge in the night, had once been happy, content with life, grateful for it, possessed of a simple trust in his fellow-men--in Eldon Parr? Once more, unsummoned, came the memory of that evening of rain and thunder in the boy"s room at the top of the great horse in Park Street. He had pitied Eldon Parr then. Did he now?
He crossed the room, on tiptoe, as though he feared to wake once more this poor wretch to his misery and hate, Gently he covered again the face with the sheet.
Suddenly he knew the reason of his dread,--he had to face the woman!
He was a minister of Christ, it was his duty to speak to her, as he had spoken to others in the hour of sorrow and death, of the justice and goodness of the G.o.d to whom she had prayed in the church. What should he say, now? In an agony of spirit, he sat down on the little couch beside the window and buried his face in his hands. The sight of poor Garvin"s white and wasted features, the terrible contrast between this miserable tenement and the palace with its unseen pictures and porcelains and tapestries, brought home to him with indescribable poignancy his own predicament. He was going to ask this woman to be comforted by faith and trust in the G.o.d of the man who had driven her husband to death! He beheld Eldon Parr in his pew complacently worshipping that G.o.d, who had rewarded him with riches and success--beheld himself as another man in his white surplice acquiescing in that G.o.d, preaching vainly....
At last he got to his feet, went out of the room, reached the doorway of that other room and looked in. Mr. Bentley sat there; and the woman, whose tears had ceased to flow, was looking up into his face.
II
"The office ensuing," says the Book of Common Prayer, meaning the Burial of the Dead, "is not to be used for any Unbaptized adult, any who die excommunicate, or who have laid violent hands on themselves."
Hodder had bought, with a part of Nan Ferguson"s money, a tiny plot in a remote corner of Winterbourne Cemetery. And thither, the next morning, the body of Richard Garvin was taken.
A few mourners had stolen into the house and up the threadbare stairs into the miserable little back room, somehow dignified as it had never been before, and laid their gifts upon the coffin. An odd and pitiful a.s.sortment they were--mourners and gifts: men and women whose only bond with the man in life had been the bond of misery; who had seen him as he had fared forth morning after morning in the hopeless search for work, and slunk home night after night bitter and dejected; many of whom had listened, jeeringly perhaps, to his grievance against the world, though it were in some sort their own. Death, for them, had enn.o.bled him. The little girl whom Hodder had met with the pitcher of beer came tiptoeing with a wilted bunch of pansies, picked heaven knows where; stolen, maybe, from one of the gardens of the West End. Carnations, lilies of the valley, geraniums even--such were the offerings scattered loosely on the lid until a woman came with a ma.s.s of white roses that filled the room with their fragrance,--a woman with burnished red hair.
Hodder started as he recognized her; her gaze was a strange mixture of effrontery and--something else; sorrow did not quite express it. The very lavishness of her gift brought to him irresistibly the reminder of another offering. .... She was speaking.
"I don"t blame him for what he done--I"d have done it, too, if I"d been him. But say, I felt kind of bad when I heard it, knowing about the kid, and all. I had to bring something--"
Instinctively Hodder surmised that she was in doubt as to the acceptance of her flowers. He took them from her hand, and laid them at the foot of the coffin.
"Thank you," he said, simply.
She stared at him a moment with the perplexity she had shown at times on the night he visited her, and went out...
Funerals, if they might be dignified by this name, were not infrequent occurrences in Dalton Street, and why this one should have been looked upon as of sufficient importance to collect a group of onlookers at the gate it is difficult to say. Perhaps it was because of the seeming interest in it of the higher powers--for suicide and consequent widows and orphans were not unknown there. This widow and this orphan were to be miraculously rescued, were to know Dalton Street no more. The rector of a fashionable church, of all beings, was the agent in the miracle.
Thus the occasion was tinged with awe. As for Mr. Bentley, his was a familiar figure, and had been remarked in Dalton Street funerals before.
They started, the three mourners, on the long drive to the cemetery, through unfrequented streets lined with mediocre dwellings, interspersed with groceries and saloons--short cuts known only to hea.r.s.e drivers: they traversed, for some distance, that very Wilderness road where Mr.
Bentley"s old-fashioned mansion once had stood on its long green slope, framed by ancient trees; the Wilderness road, now paved with hot blocks of granite over which the carriage rattled; spread with car tracks, bordered by heterogeneous buildings of all characters and descriptions, bakeries and breweries, slaughter houses and markets, tumble-down shanties, weedy corner lots and "refreshment-houses" that announced "Lager Beer, Wines and Liquors." At last they came to a region which was neither country nor city, where the road-houses were still in evidence, where the gla.s.s roofs of greenhouses caught the burning rays of the sun, where yards filled with marble blocks and half-finished tombstones appeared, and then they turned into the gates of Winterbourne.
Like the city itself, there was a fashionable district in Winterbourne: unlike the city, this district remained stationary. There was no soot here, and if there had been, the dead would not have minded it. They pa.s.sed the Prestons and the Parrs; the lots grew smaller, the tombstones less pretentious; and finally they came to an open grave on a slope where the trees were still young, and where three men of the cemetery force lifted the coffin from the hea.r.s.e--Richard Garvin"s pallbearers.
John Hodder might not read the service, but there was none to tell him that the Gospel of John was not written for this man. He stood an the gra.s.s beside the grave, and a breeze from across the great river near by stirred the maple leaves above his head. "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." Nor was there any canon to forbid the words of Paul: "It is sown in corruption; it is raised in in corruption; it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."
They laid the flowers on the fresh earth, even the white roses, and then they drove back to the city.
CHAPTER XIV. A SAt.u.r.dAY AFTERNOON
I
The sight of a certain old gentleman as he walked along the shady side of Twenty-second Street about two o"clock on a broiling Sat.u.r.day afternoon in midsummer was one not easily to be forgotten. A younger man, tall and vigorous, clad in a thin suit of blue serge, walked by his side. They were followed by a shouting troop of small boys who overran the pavements, and some of whom were armed with baseball bats. The big trolley car was hailed by a dozen dirty little hands.
Even the grumpy pa.s.sengers were disarmed. The conductor took Mr.
Bentley"s bill deprecatingly, as much as to say that the newly organized Traction Company--just out of the receivers" hands--were the Moloch, not he, and rang off the fares under protest. And Mr. Bentley, as had been his custom for years, sat down and took off his hat, and smiled so benignly at those around him that they immediately began to talk, to him. It was always irresistible, this desire to talk to Mr. Bentley. If you had left your office irritated and out of sorts, your nerves worn to an edge by the uninterrupted heat, you invariably got off at your corner feeling better. It was Phil Goodrich who had said that Horace Bentley had only to get on a Tower Street car to turn it into a church. And if he had chosen to establish that "dernier cri" of modern civilization where ladies go who have "welt-schmerz" without knowing why,--a sanitarium, he might have gained back again all the money he had lost in giving his Grantham stock to Eldon Parr.