everyone’ll take a glass of sherry and a biscuit,” said Mrs. Johnson. “We don’t stand on ceremony,” and a decanter appeared in the place of Uncle Pentstemon’s vegetables.
Uncle Pentstemon had refused to be relieved of his hat; he sat stiffly down on a chair against the wall with that venerable headdress between his feet, watching the approach of anyone jealously. “Don’t you go squashing my hat,” he said. Conversation became confused and general. Uncle Pentstemon addressed himself to Mr. Polly. “You’re a little chap,” he said, “a puny little chap. I never did agree to Lizzie marrying him, but I suppose by-gones must be bygones now. I suppose they made you a clerk or something.”
“Outfitter,” said Mr. Polly.
“I remember. Them girls pretend to be dressmakers.”
“They are dressmakers,” said Mrs. Larkins across the room.
“I will take a glass of sherry. They ’old to it, you see.”
He took the glass Mrs. Johnson handed him, and poised it critically between a horny finger and thumb. “You’ll be paying for this,” he said to Mr. Polly. “Here’s to you. … Don’t you go treading on my hat, young woman. You brush your skirts against it and you take a shillin’ off its value. It ain’t the sort of ’at you see nowadays.”
He drank noisily.
The sherry presently loosened everybody’s tongue, and the early coldness passed.
“There ought to have been a post-mortem,” Polly heard Mrs. Punt remarking to one of Mrs. Johnson’s friends, and Miriam and another were lost in admiration of Mrs. Johnson’s decorations. “So very nice and refined,” they were both repeating at intervals.
The sherry and biscuits were still being discussed when Mr. Podger, the undertaker, arrived, a broad, cheerfully sorrowful, clean-shaven little man, accompanied by a melancholy-faced assistant. He conversed for a time with Johnson in the passage outside; the sense of his business stilled the rising waves of chatter and carried off everyone’s attention in the wake of his heavy footsteps to the room above.
IV
Things crowded upon Mr. Polly. Everyone, he noticed, took sherry with a solemn avidity, and a small portion even was administered sacramentally to the Punt boy. There followed a distribution of black kid gloves, and much trying on and humouring of fingers. “Good gloves,” said one of Mrs. Johnson’s friends. “There’s a little pair there for Willie,” said Mrs. Johnson triumphantly. Everyone seemed gravely content with the amazing procedure of the occasion. Presently Mr. Podger was picking Mr. Polly out as Chief Mourner to go with Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Larkins and Annie in the first mourning carriage.
“Right O,” said Mr. Polly, and repented instantly of the alacrity of the phrase.
“There’ll have to be a walking party,” said Mrs. Johnson cheerfully. “There’s only two coaches. I daresay we can put in six in each, but that leaves three over.”
There was a generous struggle to be pedestrian, and the two other Larkins girls, confessing coyly to tight new boots and displaying a certain eagerness, were added to the contents of the first carriage.
“It’ll be a squeeze,” said Annie.
“I don’t mind a squeeze,” said Mr. Polly.
He decided privately that the proper phrase for the result of that remark was “Hysterial catechunations.”
Mr. Podger re-entered the room from a momentary supervision of the bumping business that was now proceeding down the staircase.
“Bearing up,” he said cheerfully, rubbing his hands together. “Bearing up!”
That stuck very vividly in Mr. Polly’s mind, and so did the close-wedged drive to the churchyard, bunched in between two young women in confused dull and shiny black, and the fact that the wind was bleak and that the officiating clergyman had a cold, and sniffed between his sentences. The wonder of life! The wonder of everything! What had he expected that this should all be so astoundingly different.
He found his attention converging more and more upon the Larkins cousins. The interest was reciprocal. They watched him with a kind of suppressed excitement and became risible with his every word and gesture. He was more and more aware of their personal quality. Annie had blue eyes and a red, attractive mouth, a harsh voice and a habit of extreme liveliness that even this occasion could not suppress; Minnie was fond, extremely free about the touching of hands and suchlike endearments; Miriam was quieter and regarded him earnestly. Mrs. Larkins was very happy in her daughters, and they had the naïve affectionateness of those who see few people and find a strange cousin a wonderful outlet. Mr. Polly had never been very much kissed, and it made his mind swim. He did not know for the life of him whether he liked or disliked all or any of the Larkins cousins. It was rather attractive to make them laugh; they laughed at anything.
There they were tugging at his mind, and the funeral tugging at his mind, too, and the sense of himself as Chief Mourner in a brand new silk hat with a broad mourning band. He watched the ceremony and missed his responses, and strange feelings twisted at his heartstrings.
V
Mr. Polly walked back to the house because he wanted to be alone. Miriam and Minnie would have accompanied him, but finding Uncle Pentstemon beside the Chief Mourner they went on in front.
“You’re wise,” said Uncle Pentstemon.
“Glad you think so,” said Mr. Polly, rousing himself to talk.
“I likes a bit of walking before a meal,” said Uncle Pentstemon, and made a kind of large hiccup. “That sherry rises,” he remarked. “Grocer’s stuff, I expect.”
He went on to ask how much the funeral might be costing, and seemed pleased to find Mr. Polly didn’t know.
“In that case,” he said impressively, “it’s pretty certain to cost more’n you expect, my boy.”
He meditated for a time. “I’ve seen a mort of undertakers,” he declared; “a mort of undertakers.”
The Larkins girls attracted his attention.
“Let’s lodgin’s and chars,” he commented. “Leastways she goes out to cook dinners. And look at ’em!
“Dressed up to the nines. If it ain’t borryd clothes, that is. And they goes out to work at a factory!”
“Did you know my father much, Uncle Pentstemon?” asked Mr. Polly.
“Couldn’t stand Lizzie throwin’ herself away like that,” said Uncle Pentstemon, and repeated his hiccup on a larger scale.
“That weren’t good sherry,” said Uncle Pentstemon with the first note of pathos Mr. Polly
