Tono Bungay

My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew, inconsiderately, the following spring.  Her ladyship instantly fled to Folkestone with Miss Somerville and Fison, until the funeral should be over and my mother’s successor installed.

My uncle took me over to the funeral.  I remember there was a sort of prolonged crisis in the days preceding this because, directly he heard of my loss, he had sent a pair of check trousers to the Judkins people in London to be dyed black, and they did not come back in time.  He became very excited on the third day, and sent a number of increasingly fiery telegrams without any result whatever, and succumbed next morning with a very ill grace to my aunt Susan’s insistence upon the resources of his dress-suit.  In my memory those black legs of his, in a particularly thin and shiny black cloth—­for evidently his dress-suit dated from adolescent and slenderer days—­straddle like the Colossus of Rhodes over my approach to my mother’s funeral.  Moreover, I was inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first silk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, by a deep mourning band.

I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother’s white paneled housekeeper’s room and the touch of oddness about it that she was not there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black, and I seem to recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that arose out of their focussed attention.  No doubt the sense of the new silk hat came and went and came again in my emotional chaos.  Then something comes out clear and sorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base and inconsequent things, and once again I walk before all the other mourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard path to her grave, with the old vicar’s slow voice saying regretfully and unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:  and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

Never die!  The day was a high and glorious morning in spring, and all the trees were budding and bursting into green.  Everywhere there were blossoms and flowers; the pear trees and cherry trees in the sexton’s garden were sunlit snow, there were nodding daffodils and early tulips in the graveyard beds, great multitudes of daisies, and everywhere the birds seemed singing.  And in the middle was the brown coffin end, tilting on men’s shoulders and half occluded by the vicar’s Oxford hood.

And so we came to my mother’s waiting grave.

For a time I was very observant, watching the coffin lowered, hearing the words of the ritual.  It seemed a very curious business altogether.

Suddenly as the service drew to its end, I felt something had still to be said which had not been said, realised that she had withdrawn in silence, neither forgiving me nor hearing from me—­those now lost assurances.  Suddenly I knew I had not understood.  Suddenly I saw her tenderly; remembered not so much tender or kindly things of her as her crossed wishes and the ways in which I had thwarted her.  Surprisingly I realised that behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me, that I was the only thing she had ever loved and that until this moment I had never loved her.  And now she was there and deaf and blind to me, pitifully defeated in her designs for me, covered from me so that she could not know….

I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but tears blinded me, sobs would have choked me had speech been required of me.  The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled response—­and so on to the end.  I wept as it were internally, and only when we had come out of the churchyard could I think and speak calmly again.

Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my uncle and Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and undertaker, that “it had all passed off very well—­very well indeed.”