The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  “Yes. I’ll tell them that. If you want me to.”

  She had gone too far—her commission had not extended to the point of winning from Laskell a quick complete renunciation of his benevolence. She had got herself in much too deep.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Laskell, “I can give you the sum to tell them, it’s very simple.”

  “No!—that wouldn’t be right.” There was nothing Mrs. Folger wanted less than to have to bring back an accounting. She said, “It isn’t the money so much they’re bothered by.”

  “Being beholden is what they’re bothered by, you said.” He felt he was pushing her almost too hard.

  “Well, yes. But it’s what people will say that makes them vexed.”

  “They need only pay the money back,” Laskell said lucidly.

  “They’re vexed that a stranger—a young man—”

  “It’s nice of them, Mrs. Folger. A young man! But I’m really not so very young, you know.” It was the first time he had ever denied it. To do so gave him a kind of comfort. It made him feel younger than he had been feeling for some time.

  But Mrs. Folger would not accept his evasion. She said quite sternly, “You know what I mean, Mr. Laskell. A man. After all, you know Emily Caldwell—”

  “Only slightly. Just remind Miss Walker and Mrs. Bradley that it was two men. Mr. Simpson and myself. Mr. Simpson arrived just three days ago. I believe that Mr. Simpson and Miss Walker know each other. If it’s scandal they’re worried about—”

  “Oh, no—just what people will say.”

  “They’ll say it was an act of friendship. Two men from the city just happened to be here and happened to have some money available and they took care of things to spare a woman pain and trouble. Isn’t that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all.” But Laskell heard the reluctance and resentment in her voice.

  He said, “Miss Walker has no more reason to be disturbed about this than about Mrs. Caldwell’s taking relief money. It’s just as impersonal.”

  This was gratuitous and he looked at Mrs. Folger to see how she took it. She was very bitter, but she had nothing to say. There had not, he thought, been malice in her comments. It was only that her loyalty of commitment to Miss Walker, and by extension to Mrs. Bradley, was very deep. Loyalty was a virtue.

  “And you’ll tell the two ladies about the money? You’ll tell them that Mr. Simpson and I will make no difficulty about its being paid back?”

  She did not speak an answer, did not even nod one, only looked at him with her clear, blue, intelligent eyes full of understanding and dislike for him. She knew he was seeing all there was to be seen and she held her look boldly, returning his, and then he saw something fade and change in her eyes and knew that she was looking at him with less dislike and no small respect. He thought how difficult it was to get along with people and how many different ways one had to use, and he began to sink into the full tiredness of the events of the last twenty-four hours.

  12

  THE FUNERAL was held the next day at ten o’clock. Laskell came to the Crooms’ before going to the church because Arthur had asked him to—Arthur wanted as many friends around Nancy as possible. Nancy’s eyes that morning were deeply ringed and her face was pinched and drawn. The death of the child had shaken her terribly. She moved with a touch of the somnambulism of the bereaved, almost as if the dead child were somewhat hers. But she could not, after all, go to the funeral, although she wanted to. There was no Eunice to stay with Micky—the terrible event had made Miss Walker’s need of Eunice immediate and Nancy had been told that morning that she could not have the full respite of four days that had been promised her.

  Kermit and Maxim wore white linen jackets and Kermit was disturbed that they did not have clothes more proper for the occasion. He was casual about his dress, but some deep ritualistic propriety made it seem very wrong to him to attend a funeral in a white linen jacket. But he had no other; he looked with envy at the dark suits that Laskell and Arthur wore.

  When the four men were already on their way, Nancy came out to the road and called after them, and when they stopped and turned, she said, “John, wait a minute!” She went back toward the house. Laskell walked back, leaving the others waiting for him, and when he came to the house he found Nancy at one of her flower beds. On the whole, Nancy’s flowers had not done well that summer. She had planted rather too late and she did not have, as she herself said, liking the country phrase, a green thumb. But the cosmos, an easy flower to grow, had done fairly well and so had a bed of purple and white asters. With a kitchen knife Nancy was rapidly cutting the flowers of the cosmos, taking every one of them, and when she had finished doing that, she stripped the bed of asters. The two kinds of flowers made a very large bunch when Nancy gathered them up. The colors went happily together, and because Nancy had cut low on each stem, there was a great deal of green. It was a wild and beautiful profusion and Nancy gave it to Laskell with a sudden impulsive gesture. She had cut every flower and every bud and she had cut low and now the beds looked startlingly bare. As Laskell held the big bunch and was not quite able to turn away from her ravaged look, she said, “The stems—they aren’t even. Let me cut them.” In her hurry, she had pulled at a few of the stalks so that the whole plants had come up with their roots; Laskell held the bouquet for her to trim it as she wished. She cut with a feverish haste and an excess of concentration, and suddenly she cried out and thrust the thumb of her left hand into her mouth.

  “You’ve cut yourself!” Laskell said.

  She shook her head vigorously, angry at herself and refusing to pay any attention to her hurt. Laskell put down the flowers and took Nancy’s hand from her mouth.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m so damned clumsy.”

  It certainly was nothing much of a cut, but Laskell took his handkerchief and wiped away the little flow of blood. “Go put some iodine on it,” he said.

  “It’s nothing. Don’t pay any attention to it. Go along, John, you’ll be late.”

  “Put some iodine on it,” he said.

  He picked up the flowers and left her. The other men had begun to walk back in impatience, and they stood in the road just before the house. Laskell said, “Arthur, why don’t you stay with Nancy? She’d like you to, I think.”

  Arthur took the suggestion with a kind of relief. “I think I’d better,” he said.

  So Laskell, Maxim, and Kermit set off to the funeral without either of the Crooms. But they had not gone far when Arthur caught up with them. “She doesn’t want me to stay,” he explained. “She insisted I come.”

  The coffin stood on a pair of trestles before the communion-table, and Laskell, seeing it, was for some reason surprised that it was the very same one that he and Kermit had selected yesterday. He had somehow never supposed that the coffin—the casket—they had bought after having all its advantages lucidly explained by the undertaker would actually figure in the burial of Susan Caldwell. He was startled that it was white after all—the undertaker had explained that white was appropriate for a child, that in fact the only caskets of proper size were white. Neither he nor Kermit had quite liked it, they would have preferred dark wood, but they had yielded to exigency and to what the undertaker had assured them was local custom.

  A sheaf of delphinium had been laid on the coffin, and on pedestals set at the four corners there were vases of flowers. Laskell did not know what to do with the bouquet he had brought, and he was sitting at the end of a pew, awkwardly holding it, when Glenda Parks turned, saw him, and came over. “Would you like me to take those?” she said, and Laskell gave the flowers to her. Then she saw that they were loose, and she said, “I’ll fix them.” She went away and came back shortly with the flowers tied with a string. She showed this to him, nodding and smiling, and then she went forward and laid them on the coffin. On her way back she smiled to him and he nodded and smiled his thanks. He thought it very kind of her.

  There were about fifty or sixty people in the chur
ch, and Laskell saw that almost everyone who had been at the Bazaar was here now. They sat without impatience, as people do at funerals; they have come promptly at the time appointed even though they know that they are sure to have to wait for the service to begin. Miss Walker came in, attended by Mr. and Mrs. Folger. She took a seat in the first pew and the Folgers sat behind her.

  They did not have very long to wait. Presently Mr. Gurney came down the aisle followed by Emily Caldwell and the two women who flanked her. Laskell recognized one as Mrs. Gurney, whom he had met yesterday when he and Kermit had called on the minister. The other was no doubt Mrs. Bradley, the half-sister from Hartford, who, with Miss Walker, was said to be so vexed with him. She looked vexed now but in a forbearing way. Emily wore a black dress and a black hat. This strange apparel made her seem alien and, to Laskell, almost frightening.

  Mr. Gurney led the women down the center aisle and to the first pew. As Emily was about to enter the pew, Miss Walker rose and stepped out into the aisle and put out a hand, ineffectually, not so much giving support as indicating that she would be willing to give it. At this there was an exchange of glances among a few of the congregation, those who were interested in the old quarrel, and Glenda Parks turned and looked at Laskell as if this were a matter that would especially interest him.

  The minister took his place beside the coffin. In his hand he held a little black book. It was called The Pastor’s Helpful Funeral Guide. Laskell knew the book, for yesterday, when they had gone to see Mr. Gurney and had been asked by his wife to wait in the dining-room, the book had been lying on the table and Laskell had read in it. It contained all that a minister might need to know about the conduct of a funeral. It began with the near approach of death, instructing the pastor in how many times he should call on a family when bereavement threatened. The book contained three services—Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist, although Mr. Gurney himself, it had turned out, was of the Congregationalist Church. All three faiths lived very comfortably in the small black book and Laskell thought how many passions had died, how much belief had attenuated, to make this possible. The book contained all the scriptural texts that were relevant to the occasion, and prayers, and poems, and lines of poems that could be quoted to advantage.

  Mr. Gurney began the service by reading a sentence from the book, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and then several other scriptural sentences. He ended with the sentence “He shall feed his flocks like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom.” After this he spoke an invocation and then the Lord’s Prayer. The congregation repeated the prayer softly with him, and Laskell was startled to hear Maxim saying it out beside him in a loud full voice. He had not, like Kermit Simpson, doubted Maxim’s conversion to religion, but he was not prepared for devotion. Kermit was repeating the prayer in a quiet decorous voice, Arthur was not saying it at all. Both turned their eyes to Maxim in his fervor. But Maxim refused to be aware of any surprise he may have caused his friends.

  Then the minister read a Psalm and then he read from Corinthians. Mr. Gurney must have had some sense of Susan’s strangeness, or perhaps of Emily’s, for he chose to read: “But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues: But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.” He also read the texts about there being both celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies, both having their own glory. “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another in glory.” Laskell found this emphasis on diversity very relevant. He liked being reminded of the difference of gifts and of glories. He had been brought up without religious belief and the words had no force of childhood reminiscence; he knew them only from having read St. Paul the year he had studied philosophy. Yet they had considerable force. When the minister read appropriate sentences from Mark and Matthew about little children and the kingdom of heaven, they did not seem to have nearly so much to do with Susan.

  And now Mr. Gurney seemed to commune with himself. He looked inward, and when he looked outward again it was to convey the idea that he meant no one any harm. He was about to make an address, to say a few words. Laskell wished Mr. Gurney had chosen to say nothing in his own person; the old things from the Bible that were available to say were still the best things because they were old and had always been said. Looking through the Helpful Guide at the minister’s house, he had especially studied the “Hints for Sermons.” The hints were actually outlines. The one for the funeral of a child opened with the text from Isaiah, “And a little child shall lead them,” and then it had gone on: “Power of a little child ... Infant fingers pluck sweet music from heart-strings ... What it means to be as a little child ... ‘Heaven lay about me in my infancy.’—Wm. Wordsworth ... ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’—Lord Tennyson.” The outline had not promised well for the sermon Mr. Gurney might deliver. Yet Mr. Gurney not only delivered a sermon similar in kind—he delivered, as Laskell recalled at every point, this very sermon. And perhaps all the rest of the congregation knew the sermon too. Perhaps it was the same address the minister made whenever a child died, and therefore his words, so far as this community went, were as traditional as anything he had read from the Bible.

  The cemetery was a short distance from the church, up the road to the right, in a direction Laskell had never taken. Here Laskell saw Emily’s face—saw it across the open grave in which the coffin lay. It was flushed and dry, like the face of a woman who has just come out of surgical anaesthetic. It was terribly composed. When Laskell saw it, his stomach contracted with fear. He found it frightening to know that the face which, on the river bank, should have been so eager and warm with the knowledge of love should now be so rigid with the knowledge of death.

  The service at the grave was shorter than the service in the church. Mr. Gurney’s good heart surely must have wished that his small community could have afforded the grieving mother the kind of protection from the harsh physical facts of death that modern thoughtfulness had devised. He must have wished that instead of the trestle of boards across the grave, which made a scraping and hollow sound as they were removed, and the creaking ropes, there could have been one of those contrivances which noiselessly lower the coffin into the grave, giving the effect of a process being carried out by unseen hands. And he must have wished too that the raw red earth could have been covered with blankets of artificial grass. But he did what he could. He omitted, as it was his option to do, the old phrase “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He had thoughtfully provided a little handful of flowers—they chanced to be a few of Nancy’s asters and cosmos—which, rather than earth, he gave to Emily to throw into the grave. She took them obediently, and obediently threw them upon the coffin. But then she knelt, as if in obedience this time to some old memory or instinct, and gathered up a handful of earth. She crumbled it fine with her fingers, took out two or three small pebbles, and let it fall into the grave. Mr. Gurney said the Lord’s Prayer again; at the first words, Maxim knelt down. Laskell did not know whether in the ritual of any of the faiths one knelt for the Lord’s Prayer, but there was Maxim on his knees, asking for his daily bread, and for the kingdom to come, and for forgiveness for his trespasses, and for deliverance from evil. Everyone looked at him in surprise.

  Laskell had not yet made plans for his departure. Until Susan’s death, he had vaguely thought that he might continue in the country for another two weeks. But walking away from the cemetery he realized that his time here was up, and when he went to the Caldwell house that afternoon he knew his visit
was one of farewell. And even if he had not been leaving, Emily was. Mrs. Folger had told him that Emily Caldwell was to be “taken away” by her family and that seemed expectable enough. But even if she had been staying, he would have had nothing else to say to her except good-by.

  Good-by was virtually all he said. The half-sister was there in the tiny ingenious room, not particularly hostile but thoroughly on guard. The family, it was clear, had suffered enough from Emily’s vagaries; the death of Susan, under such circumstances, they seemed to regard as a last slur on their Hartford respectability. The half-sister sat there in black, not unkind, but conspicuously appointed to see that, at least while she was present, things should be as they should be. Beneath the middle-aged capability of her face was the resentment of her compromised position in being so closely related to the wife of a man who had killed his child, a man who was himself in jail.

  “I’ve come to say good-by,” Laskell said. With the half-sister listening, it was the most personal communication he could make.

  “Are you leaving?” said Emily politely.

  “Well, soon,” said Laskell. “Soon. I heard you were going away.”

  “Yes, I’m taking Emily home for a while,” said Mrs. Bradley. She said to Emily, “Do you want some more tea?” There was a teapot on the table and an untasted cup of tea before Emily. Laskell had the impression that the half-sisters had been sitting there quite a long time without saying anything.

  “No, thank you,” said Emily, and shook her head.

  Laskell repressed the impulse to say, “Try her with coffee.” He remembered what it was to her—nectar and ambrosia.