Moreover, I was
inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first
silk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, by a deep mourning band.
I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneled
housekeeper's room and the touch of oddness about it that she was not
there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black, and I seem
to recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that arose out of their
focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the new silk hat came and went
and came again in my emotional chaos. Then something comes out clear and
sorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base
and inconsequent things, and once again I walk before all the other
mourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard
path to her grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully
and unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.
"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.
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