The Essential G. B. Shaw: Celebrated Plays, Novels, Personal Letters, Essays & Articles. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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СКАЧАТЬ minutes an hour!” He stood looking down at the face and tasting this sombre reflection for a long time. When it palled on him, he roused himself, and exclaimed more cheerfully:

      “After all, she is not dead. Every word she uttered — every idea she formed and expressed, was an inexhaustible and indestructible impulse.” He paused, considered a little further, and relapsed into gloom, adding, “and the dozen others whose names will be with hers in the ‘Times’ tomorrow? Their words too are still in the air, to endure there to all eternity. Hm! How the air must be crammed with nonsense! Two sounds sometimes produce a silence; perhaps ideas neutralize one another in some analogous way. No, my dear; you are dead and gone and done with, and I shall be dead and gone and done with too soon to leave me leisure to fool myself with hopes of immortality. Poor Hetty! Well, good-by, my darling. Let us pretend for a moment that you can hear that; I know it will please you.”

      All this was in a half-articulate whisper. When he ceased he still bent over the body, gazing intently at it. Even when he had exhausted the subject, and turned to go, he changed his mind, and looked again for a while. Then he stood erect, apparently nerved and refreshed, and left the room with a firm step. The woman was waiting outside. Seeing that he was less distressed than when he entered, she said:

      “I hope you are satisfied, sir!”

      “Delighted! Charmed! The arrangements are extremely pretty and tasteful. Most consolatory.” And he gave her half a sovereign.

      “I thank you, sir,” she said, dropping a curtsey. “The poor young lady! She was anxious to see you, sir. To hear her say that you were the only one that cared for her! And so fretful with her mother, too. ‘Let him be told that I am dangerously ill,’ says she, ‘and he’ll come.’ She didn’t know how true her word was, poor thing; and she went off without being aware of it.”

      “Flattering herself and flattering me. Happy girl!”

      “Bless you, I know what her feelings were, sir; I have had experience.” Here she approached him confidentially, and whispered: “The family were again’ you, sir, and she knew it. But she wouldn’t listen to them. She thought of nothing, when she was easy enough to think at all, but of your coming. And — hush! Here’s the old gentleman.”

      Trefusis looked round and saw Mr. Jansenius, whose handsome face was white and seamed with grief and annoyance. He drew back from the proffered hand of his son-in-law, like an overworried child from an ill-timed attempt to pet it. Trefusis pitied him. The nurse coughed and retired.

      “Have you been speaking to Mrs. Jansenius?” said Trefusis.

      “Yes,” said Jansenius offensively.

      “So have I, unfortunately. Pray make my apologies to her. I was rude. The circumstances upset me.”

      “You are not upset, sir,” said Jansenius loudly. “You do not care a damn.”

      Trefusis recoiled.

      “You damned my feelings, and I will damn yours,” continued Jansenius in the same tone. Trefusis involuntarily looked at the door through which he had lately passed. Then, recovering himself, he said quietly:

      “It does not matter. She can’t hear us.”

      Before Jansenius could reply his wife hurried upstairs, caught him by the arm, and said, “Don’t speak to him, John. And you,” she added, to Trefusis, “WILL you begone?”

      “What!” he said, looking cynically at her. “Without my dead! Without my property! Well, be it so.”

      “What do you know of the feelings of a respectable man?” persisted Jansenius, breaking out again in spite of his wife. “Nothing is sacred to you. This shows what Socialists are!”

      “And what fathers are, and what mothers are,” retorted Trefusis, giving way to his temper. “I thought you loved Hetty, but I see that you only love your feelings and your respectability. The devil take both! She was right; my love for her, incomplete as it was, was greater than yours.” And he left the house in dudgeon.

      But he stood awhile in the avenue to laugh at himself and his father-in-law. Then he took a hansom and was driven to the house of his solicitor, whom he wished to consult on the settlement of his late wife’s affairs.

      CHAPTER X

       Table of Contents

      The remains of Henrietta Trefusis were interred in Highgate Cemetery the day before Christmas Eve. Three noblemen sent their carriages to the funeral, and the friends and clients of Mr. Jansenius, to a large number, attended in person. The bier was covered with a profusion of costly Bowers. The undertaker, instructed to spare no expense, provided long-tailed black horses, with black palls on their backs and black plumes upon their foreheads; coachmen decorated with scarves and jack-boots, black hammercloths, cloaks, and gloves, with many hired mourners, who, however, would have been instantly discharged had they presumed to betray emotion, or in any way overstep their function of walking beside the hearse with brass-tipped batons in their hands.

      Among the genuine mourners were Mr. Jansenius, who burst into tears at the ceremony of casting earth on the coffin; the boy Arthur, who, preoccupied by the novelty of appearing in a long cloak at the head of a public procession, felt that he was not so sorry as he ought to be when he saw his papa cry; and a cousin who had once asked Henrietta to marry him, and who now, full of tragic reflections, was enjoying his despair intensely.

      The rest whispered, whenever they could decently do so, about a strange omission in the arrangements. The husband of the deceased was absent. Members of the family and intimate friends were told by Daniel Jansenius that the widower had acted in a blackguard way, and that the Janseniuses did not care twopence whether he came or stayed at home; that, but for the indecency of the thing, they were just as glad that he was keeping away. Others, who had no claim to be privately informed, made inquiries of the undertaker’s foreman, who said he understood the gentleman objected to large funerals. Asked why, he said he supposed it was on the ground of expense. This being met by a remark that Mr. Trefusis was very wealthy, he added that he had been told so, but believed the money had not come from the lady; that people seldom cared to go to a great expense for a funeral unless they came into something good by the death; and that some parties the more they had the more they grudged. Before the funeral guests dispersed, the report spread by Mr. Jansenius’s brother had got mixed with the views of the foreman, and had given rise to a story of Trefusis expressing joy at his wife’s death with frightful oaths in her father’s house whilst she lay dead there, and refusing to pay a farthing of her debts or funeral expenses.

      Some days later, when gossip on the subject was subsiding, a fresh scandal revived it. A literary friend of Mr. Jansenius’s helped him to compose an epitaph, and added to it a couple of pretty and touching stanzas, setting forth that Henrietta’s character had been one of rare sweetness and virtue, and that her friends would never cease to sorrow for her loss. A tradesman who described himself as a “monumental mason” furnished a book of tomb designs, and Mr. Jansenius selected a highly ornamental one, and proposed to defray half the cost of its erection. Trefusis objected that the epitaph was untrue, and said that he did not see why tombstones should be privileged to publish false statements. It was reported that he had followed up his former misconduct by calling his father-in-law a liar, and that he had ordered a common tombstone from some cheap-jack at the East-end. He had, in fact, spoken contemptuously of the monumental tradesman as an “exploiter” of labor, and had asked a young working mason, СКАЧАТЬ