They had reached the top of the hill. Church Street ended levelly a block beyond, in the narrow gulch of the avenue. They saw, with quickened pulse, the little pullulation of the town.
A negro dug tenderly in the round loamy flowerbeds of the Presbyterian churchyard, bending now and then to thrust his thick fingers gently in about the roots. The old church, with its sharp steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man’s life, down into its wet lichened brick. Eugene looked gratefully, with a second’s pride, at its dark decorum, its solid Scotch breeding.
“I’m a Presbyterian,” he said. “What are you?”
“An Episcopalian, when I go,” said George Graves with irreverent laughter.
“To hell with these Methodists!” Eugene said with an elegant, disdainful face. “They’re too damn common for us.” God in three persons — blessed Trinity. “Brother Graves,” he continued, in a fat well-oiled voice, “I didn’t see you at prayer-meeting Wednesday night. Where in Jesus’ name were you?”
With his open palm he struck George Graves violently between his meaty shoulders. George Graves staggered drunkenly with high resounding laughter.
“Why, Brother Gant,” said he, “I had a little appointment with one of the Good Sisters, out in the cow-shed.”
Eugene gathered a telephone pole into his wild embrace, and threw one leg erotically over its second foot-wedge. George Graves leaned his heavy shoulder against it, his great limbs drained with laughter.
There was a hot blast of steamy air from the Appalachian Laundry across the street and, as the door from the office of the washroom opened, they had a moment’s glimpse of negresses plunging their wet arms into the liquefaction of their clothes.
George Graves dried his eyes. Laughing wearily, they crossed over.
“We oughtn’t to talk like that, ‘Gene,” said George Graves reproachfully. “Sure enough! It’s not right.”
He became moodily serious rapidly. “The best people in this town are church members,” he said earnestly. “It’s a fine thing.”
“Why?” said Eugene, with an idle curiosity.
“Because,” said George Graves, “you get to know all the people who are worth a damn.”
Worth being damned, he thought quickly. A quaint idea.
“It helps you in a business way. They come to know you and respect you. You won’t get far in this town, ‘Gene, without them. It pays,” he added devoutly, “to be a Christian.”
“Yes,” Eugene agreed seriously, “you’re right.” To walk together to the kirk, with a goodly company.
He thought sadly of his lost sobriety, and of how once, lonely, he had walked the decent lanes of God’s Scotch town. Unbidden they came again to haunt his memory, the shaven faces of good tradesmen, each leading the well washed kingdom of his home in its obedient ritual the lean hushed smiles of worship, the chained passion of devotion, as they implored God’s love upon their ventures, or delivered their virgin daughters into the holy barter of marriage. And from even deeper adyts of his brain there swam up slowly to the shores of his old hunger the great fish whose names he scarcely knew — whose names, garnered with blind toil from a thousand books, from Augustine, himself a name, to Jeremy Taylor, the English metaphysician, were brief evocations of scalded light, electric, phosphorescent, illuminating by their magic connotations the vast far depths of ritual and religion: They came — Bartholomew, Hilarius, Chrysostomos, Polycarp, Anthony, Jerome, and the forty martyrs of Cappadocia who walked the waves — coiled like their own green shadows for a moment, and were gone.
“Besides,” said George Graves, “a man ought to go anyway. Honesty’s the best policy.”
Across the street, on the second floor of a small brick three-story building that housed several members of the legal, medical, surgical, and dental professions, Dr. H. M. Smathers pumped vigorously with his right foot, took a wad of cotton from his assistant, Miss Lola Bruce, and thrusting it securely into the jaw of the unseen patient, bent his fashionable bald head intently. A tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains, and revealed him, white-jacketed, competent, drill in hand.
“Do you feel that?” he said tenderly.
“Wrogd gdo gurk!”
“Spit!” With thee conversing, I forget all time.
“I suppose,” said George Graves thoughtfully, “the gold they use in people’s teeth is worth a lot of money.”
“Yes,” said Eugene, finding the idea attractive, “if only one person in ten has gold fillings that would be ten million in the United States alone. You can figure on five dollars’ worth each, can’t you?”
“Easy!” said George Graves. “More than that.” He brooded lusciously a moment. “That’s a lot of money,” he said.
In the office of the Rogers–Malone Undertaking Establishment the painful family of death was assembled, “Horse” Hines, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his feet thrust out on the broad window-ledge, chatted lazily with Mr. C. M. Powell, the suave silent partner. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest. Forget not yet.
“There’s good money in undertaking,” said George Graves. “Mr. Powell’s well off.”
Eugene’s eyes were glued on the lantern face of “Horse” Hines. He beat the air with a convulsive arm, and sank his fingers in his throat.
“What’s the matter?” cried George Graves.
“They shall not bury me alive,” he said.
“You can’t tell,” George Graves said gloomily. “It’s been known to happen. They’ve dug them up later and found them turned over on their faces.”
Eugene shuddered. “I think,” he suggested painfully, “they’re supposed to take out your insides when they embalm you.”
“Yes,” said George Graves more hopefully, “and that stuff they use would kill you anyway. They pump you full of it.”
With shrunken heart, Eugene considered. The ghost of old fear, that had been laid for years, walked forth to haunt him.
In his old fantasies of death he had watched his living burial, had foreseen his waking life-indeath, his slow, frustrated efforts to push away the smothering flood of earth until, as a drowning swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers thrust from the ground a call for hands.
Fascinated, they stared through screen-doors down the dark central corridor, flanked by jars of weeping ferns. A sweet funereal odor of carnations and cedar-wood floated on the cool heavy air. Dimly, beyond a central partition, they saw a heavy casket, on a wheeled trestle, with rich silver handles and velvet coverings. The thick light faded there in dark.
“They’re laid out in the room behind,” said George Graves, lowering his voice.
To rot away into a flower, to melt into a tree with the friendless bodies of unburied men.
At this moment, having given to misery all he had (a tear), the very Reverend Father James O’Haley, S.J., among the faithless faithful only he, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, emerged plumply from the chapel, walked up the soft aisle rug with brisk short-legged strides, and came out into the light. His pale blue eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, his plump uncreased face set firmly in a smile of quiet benevolence; he covered himself with a small well-kept hat of black velvet, and set off toward the avenue. Eugene shrank back gently as the little man walked past him: that small priestly figure in black bore on him the awful accolade of his great Mistress, that smooth face had heard the unutterable, seen the unknowable. In this remote outpost of the mighty Church, he was the standard-bearer of the one true faith, the consecrate flesh of God.
“They don’t get any pay,” said George Graves sorrowfully.
“How