Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

I knew the geography of that garden as well as that of ours at home, which in fact I could see over a couple of low walls, not more than thirty yards away: the apple trees had been cut down, under whose shade I used to sit reading on summer nights like this. Aunt Milly’s garden had always been better kept than ours, thanks to the devotion of her husband. It was this one I had been reminding Martin of, when we returned to the Gearys’ after that lawyers’ dinner in the middle of the trial. It occurred to me that, since I ceased to be poor, I hadn’t had a garden of my own to sit in: that was a luxury (the thought might have pleased my mother) which I had enjoyed only in our bankrupt house.

In the moist air, the smells of the night stocks and roses were so dense that they seemed palpable. For, though Aunt Milly’s husband had been a conscientious gardener, Mr Sperry was a master: which, now I had watched him in action, didn’t surprise me. But I couldn’t remember seeing a garden of this size so rich. Phlox, lupins, delphiniums, pinks on the border, rambler roses on the wall: a syringa bush close to the bed of stocks. The scents hung all round me, like the scents of childhood.

From my chair, looking up at the house, I could see the French windows of my father’s room. They stood dark-faced, the curtains drawn since that morning. It was up the steps to those French windows that I had led Charles, over a year before. I should not go up that way again.

SUNLIGHT shining on the lacquer, the empty hearse stood outside the church. Martin’s car, and the one that I had hired, were drawn up in line. We had arrived early, and had been waiting on the pavement, near the iron palings which guarded a yew tree and the 1908 red brick. Irene and her daughter were wearing black dresses, and Margaret was in grey: Martin, Pat, Charles and I had all put on black ties. The Sperrys, though, who had just walked slowly along the road from what used to be my father’s house, were in full mourning, or at least in clothes such as I remembered at funerals in this church, he in a black suit with an additional and almost indistinguishable armband, she in jet from her hat to her shoes. As they passed us, they said a few soft words.

One or two other people were approaching, perhaps members of his old choir, who had sent a wreath. The solitary cracked bell began to toll, and I took Margaret, our feet scuffling on the gravel (was that sensation familiar to Martin too?) towards the church door. The pitch pine. The smell of wax and hassocks. The varnished chairs. In my mother’s heyday, we used to stop at a row immediately behind the churchwardens’, which she had appropriated for her own. But we couldn’t now, since the church, small as it was, was full of empty space. There were the undertaker and his four bearers. The Sperrys. The seven of the family, walking up the aisle. Three others. I didn’t know, but it might have been about the size of the congregation on Sunday mornings nowadays. With the organ playing, we moved up to the second row: there, all of us except Margaret having been drilled in anglican customs, we pulled out the hassocks and went down on our knees. It was a long time since I had been to any kind of service, longer still to a church funeral. On its trestle behind the altar rails, the coffin rested, wreath-covered, brass-handled, short, unobtrusive.

While the organ went on playing, I glanced at the hymn board, record of last Sunday’s evensong, and began mechanically — as though the boyhood habit hadn’t been interrupted by a week, organ music booming on lulled but uncomprehending ears — juggling with the numbers in my head. Once that game had made the time go faster, helping on the benediction.

The vestry door had opened and shut: the vicar was standing in front of the altar. His voice was as strong as the Clerk of Assize’s at the trial, without effort filling the empty church.

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.

At one time I knew those words by heart. I couldn’t have told whether I was listening now.

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.

I couldn’t have told whether I was listening now. Even at Sheila’s funeral, my first wife’s, though I was ill with misery, I couldn’t concentrate, I was dissociated from the beautiful clerical voice — and yes, from the coffin resting there. Yet this time I half-heard, It is certain we can carry nothing out. Just for an instant, I had a thought about my father. I wondered if the same had come to Martin, whom I had told about his possessions. No one had had much less to carry out.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.

In the morning it is green, and groweth up: but in the evening it is cut down, dried and withered.

For when thou art angry, all our days are gone: we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

The days of our age are threescore years and ten: and though men be so strong, that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.

That was being said over my father in his late eighties. It must have been said also at the funeral of Eric Mawby, aged eight.

First Corinthians Fifteen. By this time I was scarcely trying to listen, or even to follow the words in my prayer book. At school I had studied Corinthians for an examination, and I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting to my father’s forebears, who had listened to that passage, there was no escaping it, generation after generation for hundreds of years.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Not my grandfather. That deep Victorian agnostic had never been inside a church after he left school at the age of ten. Yet — one couldn’t trust a child’s memory, I might be romanticising him, but I didn’t think so — he was pious as well as agnostic, he had a library of ninteenth-century religious controversy, and then decided, just as Martin might have done, that he didn’t believe where he couldn’t believe. He would have made a good nineteenth-century Russian. I was sure, and here I did trust my memory, that he was a clever man. He would have got on with his grandchildren and with Charles.

What advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

But his father and grandfather: they hadn’t had the education he had hacked out for himself. He believed, he told me when I was five and could read quite well, that that was more than they could do. So far as he knew, his grandfather could only make his mark. Yet, he insisted, they were strong, intelligent men. He was bitter about them, and the muteness from which they came. Small craftsmen one generation: then back to agricultural labourers (not peasants, for England had had no peasants for long enough), no history, no change, further back than the church registers went. There was none of the social moving, the ups-and-downs, that had happened on my mother’s side. The Eliot families must have gone to the funeral services in the village churches, and listened to this Pauline eloquence for at least a dozen generations. Some of that gene pool was in us. Gone stoically, most of them, I thought. As with us, phrases stuck in their memories. As with me as a child, the rabbinical argumentation washed over them.

Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is they sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin: and the strength of sin is the law.