“But at least I know where I am going,” he thought, beneath his crushed hat, his stick and briefcase dragging at his arms; “which I did not seem to know before.” But he was free at last, and looking up at the clock on the courthouse, as he never failed to do on descending his office stairs, he saw that he had a full hour before supper would be ready, before the neighbors would be ready to mark his clocklike passing.
“I shall have time to go the cemetery,” he thought, and looking down at the raw and recent excavation, he swore with fretful annoyance, for some of the savage clods had fallen or been thrown upon the marble slab beside it. “Damn that Pettigrew,” he said. “He should have seen to this.
I told him I wanted the two of them as close as possible, but at least I thought that he. . . .” Kneeling, he tried to remove the earth which had fallen upon the slab. But it was beyond his strength to do more than clear away that which partially obscured the lettering: Howard Allison II. April 3, 1903. August 22, 1913, and the quietly cryptic Gothic lettering at the foot: Auf Wiedersehen, Little Boy.
He continued to smooth, to stroke the letters after the earth was gone, his face bemused, quiet, as he spoke to the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll, “You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it.
I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.” His face broke, myriad, quizzical, while his hand moved lightly upon the quiet lettering. “No. I do not require that.
To lie beside him will be sufficient for me. There will be a wall of dust between us: that is true, and he is already dust these twenty years. But some day I shall be dust too. And—” he spoke now firmly, quietly, with a kind of triumph: “who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?”
Now it was late. “Probably they are setting their clocks back at this very moment,” he thought, pacing along the street toward his home. Already he should have been hearing the lawn mower, and then in the instant of exasperation at Jake, he remarked the line of motor cars before his gate and a sudden haste came upon him.
But not so much but what, looking at the vehicle at the head of the line, he cursed again. “Damn that Pettigrew! I told him, in the presence of witnesses when I signed my will, that I would not be hauled feet first through Jefferson at forty miles an hour. That if he couldn’t find me a decent pair of horses. . . . I am a good mind to come back and haunt him, as Jake would have me do.”
But the haste, the urgency, was upon him. He hurried round to the back door (he remarked that the lawn was freshly and neatly trimmed, as though done that day) and entered. Then he could smell the flowers faintly and hear the voice; he had just time to slip out of his overcoat and pajamas and leave them hanging neatly in the closet, and cross the hall into the odor of cut flowers and the drone of the voice, and slip into his clothes. They had been recently pressed, and his face had been shaved too.
Nevertheless they were his own, and he fitted himself to the olden and familiar embrace which no iron could change, with the same lascivious eagerness with which he shaped his limbs to the bedclothes on a winter night.
“Ah,” he said to the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll, “this is best, after all. An old man is never at home save in his own garments: his own old thinking and beliefs; old hands and feet, elbow, knee, shoulder which he knows will fit.”
Now the light vanished with a mute, faint, decorous hollow sound which drove for a fading instant down upon him the dreadful, macabre smell of slain flowers; at the same time he became aware that the droning voice had ceased. “In my own house too,” he thought, waiting for the smell of the flowers to fade; “yet I did not once think to notice who was speaking, nor when he ceased.”
Then he heard or felt the decorous scuffing of feet about him, and he lay in the close dark, his hands folded upon his breast as he slept, as the old sleep, waiting for the moment. It came. He said quietly aloud, quizzical, humorous, peaceful, as he did each night in his bed in his lonely and peaceful room when a last full exhalation had emptied his body of waking and he seemed for less than an instant to look about him from the portal of sleep, “Gentlemen of the Jury, you may proceed.”
The End
