Hundreds and Thousands (41 page)

Lizzie’s room swarms with posies and reeks with their smells, heavy, cloying smells. They are very lovely and stand for many, many kindly souls and kindly thoughts, but oh, if I were there I’d rather have Indian flowers, a sprig of cedar, of mignonette, of lemon verbena or lavender, to hold and feel. The great branches of sweet peas are so flabbily determined to last out every other flower. The gladioli are glorious but if they collide against one another they sulk and shrivel. The carnations look like paper. Cut flowers are so cut off from life. Outside or on their roots they are so joyful.

Lizzie lies among the flowers facing death. I wonder how she feels about it. I wonder how I should feel if it was me. I can’t believe that Lizzie is dying. She seems so usual. Any minute she
might go or she may linger on and on. Anything would be better than that slow eating of disease. That is horrible.

Lizzie died at 5:45 this morning. I can’t use the words “passed away” or “gone” or “fell asleep.” They seem to me an affectation. I just have to say “dead.” A little past six Alice and I went to the hospital. The sisters were lovely. Lizzie died quickly and quietly. It was merciful and blessed. The day has been interminable. Alice is so brave and I snivel easily. The nieces are here, at Alice’s house. I came home to the pups and slept at night. It is nice to be alone. We are glad, everyone is glad, she was spared a long agonizing end. I don’t think of her as at the undertaker’s but as somewhere free and surprised and glad, somewhere over beyond. Dear Lizzie!

Old ladies have been to see us all day, such decrepit ones, not quite contemporaries but older. We all quietly rejoice in Lizzie’s quick, peaceful end. The old ones are half-envious. Alice and I went to see her. We took flowers from her own garden, beautiful gay marguerites and verbenas and asters, yellow snapdragons, geraniums, godetia, mignonette and honeysuckle. She was not ready. Another service was being held in the chapel. A hard-voiced, rouge-lipped, noisy woman was in the office where we sat waiting. She took the nightdress and stockings in a cold, callous way and said, “You can sit in the office and wait.” Then a man came in and they laughed and joked noisily. People whistled and banged doors. There was a spittoon next my feet filled with stale cigar stubs. “Come on,” I said to Alice, “into the parlour. It will
be quieter.” Alice followed grudgingly for she hates my nervy “uppiness.” The other room was little better except that there were no people. There were pictures of cemetery plots and diplomas for undertaking and embalming. The sun blazed in and showed lots of dust and grime. In the hall were pots of aspidistra and some deadish gladioli. People in black went through to the other funeral. Two girls in grey, who could not make up their minds to go into the chapel and face the coffin, peeped in the door and went away again quickly when the organ spoke. The hymn was quavery. It stopped. There was sniffed shuffling, and the sound of car doors shutting. Then a coarse, horrible person in black came to us. “She’s not ready,” he said. “Come back later.” “We were told to come an hour back,” I said. “Wait then,” he said and left us.

Then at last the noisy woman clanked over the tiles and said, “Come to the chapel.” She threw open the door and clicked on the lights, and slammed the door, and we were with Lizzie. The touch of Alice’s quiet hand through my arm turned a tap behind my eyes. All that was left of the old Carrs stood looking down into the quiet grey coffin. All the fret and worry was ironed out of Lizzie’s face. Every bit of earthiness was washed out and Heaven flooded in. I did not know she was so beautiful, so dignified and so sweet. It is good to look on the faces of the dead. They look like crumpled old lace that has been beautifully laundered and renovated. We laid the flowers from her own old garden in the coffin.

The three long, long days of marking time, muffled voices and shuffling feet, whispering voices and dripping tears are over.
Today the scrap of ground that Father bought and coped with granite yawns open for the fifth time. Alice and I, the pitiful remnant of Father’s nine children, must put her away among the others, hear the hollow rattle of the sod against the box way down below, and mound the brown earth and pile it high with the flowers that loved her and she loved so well. Then the shorn family must creep back to finish up the family chores.

It’s 7:30 and time to face the day. I wish the funeral was from the church instead of from those loathsome parlours. It would be comforting, I think. Carr funerals always have been, but Lizzie said it was desecration, “to take dead bodies to the house of God.” So we are carrying out her wishes. Perhaps she was really denying herself as she always did.

The funeral chapel was crowded to the doors — all kinds of people. I’ll bet everyone had had some kindness from Lizzie Carr. At the back was a little room for family so that we could cry in peace — Una, Alice, Gardner, Emmie and me. The place was banked with glorious flowers and Lizzie lay among them perfectly serene and gloriously happy, with all that crust of fret chipped off. The grave-side service was not sad. The dear brown earth was covered with a spread of mock grass, bright green. A man pushed a button and the grey coffin sank noiselessly and took its place between Father and Mother, earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. The man who ran things threw three handfuls of sod.

Then we left her. Several people came and shook our hands. They cried but they smiled too. I think they were the ones who had looked into the coffin and had seen how happy she was and realized how splendid God had been to take her so easily and
spare her so much. We had tea at Alice’s and then she and I went down to feed the pups. In the evening Una took us to the cemetery. The plot was massed with lovely flowers but already the wind had hurt them.

People say, “I want to remember Lizzie as last I saw her in life.” But I love to remember her as last I saw her in death. Life had always seemed so full of frets and worries for her. Quick, troubled movement. So often she prefaced her sentences with, “I’m afraid,” or “I’m worried over.” It was like being introduced to a new Lizzie, this radiant person in the coffin. It was as though the spirit, stepping out of the clay, had illuminated it in passing and showed up the serene, queenly presence within. People are afraid to look at the dead. Sometimes they say they want to remember them going about their ordinary tasks. I want always to remember Lizzie’s coffin face. It was so completely satisfied.

There is a dishonest feeling almost like indecency or eavesdropping in being thought dead when you are alive. Someone told me today that a girl next her in the funeral chapel was crying bitterly. Then she got up and looked in the coffin. “Oh, I’ve made a mistake,” she cried. “It is not Miss Carr, the artist.” Someone cried because they thought I was dead. That was nice of them. They did not know Lizzie. There has been much confusion because the name Emily belongs to both of us.

How hard it is to fill up a hole that somebody has gone out of! The empty feel, the hollow quietness, that ache that you can’t place as if one were sickening for something you don’t quite know what.
Every day we go over to Lizzie’s house for a few hours. Her flowers, her bantams, the big clematis vines over the verandah, the still, empty rooms that echo to the bell pull. The upstairs flat so clean and polished, left ready for a new tenant to jump into, the downstairs half empty of furniture, odd bits sitting round like orphans staring at the empty spots where the other furniture had been, and now the shabby places were bare and exposed. It was dreadfully heartachy today. We were sorting the little, last things she used, the table-napkin in its ring, the table cloth and knives and forks and cup and plate she always used. We just choked up and cried over and over. The last entry in her diary — surely by it she knew she was to go soon.

We divided the silver and the knives and the linen. We agreed that if either wanted anything in particular to speak. Now and again we could joke over some poor old family thing or some little oddity Lizzie had harboured. The joke was only a cloak to cover the awful heartache. When we came to some frightful vase or teacosy, “Yours,” Alice would say, “No yours,” I would reply, and we would push the article back and forth.

We were crying over the things in the table drawer when suddenly Alice ducked under the table and pointed towards the window. I saw a black and white female passing it with a stooped, melancholy back. I ducked too, even forgot my sciatica. There was a mournful rapping on the front door. The emptiness rapped back. Then a horrible thought — the blind was up a little. Alice oozed further under the table. I pulled my tell-tale legs further behind the sofa. We did not breathe till the gravel had stopped crunching. We were stifler getting out than going under. The work has to be done. We had to stop the day before to mop a visitor’s eyes, and got nothing done.

The bedroom is the hardest; the empty clothes, moulded and trained to Lizzie’s body, the dip of hat brims, shoes like stopped clocks, woolly jackets with little grey hair nets, her purse and her handkerchiefs, shawls, lavender water, the drawers full of well-worn things. Alice shut them quickly. “I can’t. There’s no immediate hurry. Let’s do the household linen first.” The table cloths and sheets were more impersonal.

So we divided Lizzie’s linen. Dainty, well laundered, so beautifully kept. She took such pride in these little ways, like a real woman. She scolded me so often — “Don’t muss that cloth.” “Millie don’t fold the cloth like that.” I remember how she used to make one take the end of the big table cloth and fold it, running her fingers down the fresh creases while I hung on to the other end, and how we used to fold for the old mangle, holding the sheets and shaking and shaking and her so vigorous shakes wrenching it out of your hands — the white sheets soiled — the heat of her wrath — the quick nervous jerk. What a trial I was to her! She taught me to make beds. How she pressed and smoothed, smacked pillows and set up the shams! And how bored I was! She called me a “1lthy child” because I did not dust the top of the doors, and she left me the rungs of the chairs and the fat table legs to do. And I persistently started to dust the stairs from the bottom just to annoy her. What a peppery pair we were! She said I was a disgrace to the name of Carr, with slovenly ways. I was always a thorn in her side. She loved Alice way and ahead more. That’s why I want Alice to have all her
nicest
things. She’d have loved her having them. But Alice wants us to have everything equal. I don’t think Alice could ever quite understand what happened when Lizzie and I collided. Lizzie and Alice could wear each other’s clothes. They went to the same church,
and “served” people, and their properties joined. Lizzie did not have to go on a public street. She ran to Alice’s carrying the same thought that started in her own home and caused her to go there, but when she came to me she met other people on the way and distractions, so the thought she started with got mixed up
en route
and when she got there, there was me and out shot both our horns.

The glove drawer — that was the worst of all. Black, white, brown folded neatly in pairs. We pulled the drawer open. There were two half sobs and a great deal of blinking before we saw clear enough to begin sorting. We worked steadily from 11 to 4 o’clock. “Yours,” “Mine,” “Rubbish,” “Yours,” “Mine,” “Rubbish.” Five drawers in the mahogany chest, four in the white chest. Why do we hoard? But the oddments are handy. I have a bothersome way of finding a use for everything. I know I am thrifty. I hate to waste. An article would dangle with our four eyes appraising it. Alice would shake her head, “No room in my house.” My knot would nod; it would come in for so and so. Seemed like everything could be used some way, and it would be rammed into my trunk. I can’t think what will happen when I bring them home. “This?)” — Alice held up a layette outfit (paper patterns). “One of us might have a baby,” I said, and we went off into a “sixty-year cackle.” It was those silly cackles that kept us up. Cackle or cry? Alice looked very white. My sciatic limp was bad coming home.

Lizzie had millions of tracts; prayer circle literature, missionary societies, little framed recipes for pious behaviour, pious poems, daily reminders, church almanacks, church of the air, British Israel, Christian Endeavour, Y.M.C.A., Sunday school, church gazettes, and enough Bibles to supply the whole British and Foreign Bible Society. I can’t think how she could
read them all in three life times. She was that way from her cradle up —
pious
and
good.

I DO NOT THINK
it is any healthier to have drawers, shelves, tables, cupboards stuffed with tracts and holy books, recipes for when, where, and how to pray, daily reminders, etc. etc., than it is to have every room of the house stuffed with edibles. Dear soul, how she worried over how to get there. She
got
there — the radiant glow in her face told
that
— but she travelled by a different route. All the routes are hard anyhow, I guess. Maybe those who take the hardest enjoy most the joy of arriving. It seemed rather horrible burning up all those hundreds of pamphlets. Lots of the recipes for prayers were good and well tested, but rather elaborate. (Mrs. Cridge used to make the most
delicious
little dropcakes. Once a week we went over to the Cridges’ and read one of Dickens’ books aloud. About ten minutes before we were due Mrs. Cridge seized a mix bowl, ran to the cupboard, dipped out flour, raisins, sugar, spice — pinches of things — beat them together with her own fingers. The batter dropped off the end, bumpy with raisins, and set in little blobs higgledy-piggledy over a black square pan. Oven door banged, fire crackled and lovely smells ran to the front door. When we rang there was flour on Mrs. Cridge’s nose, even when she kissed us. Those cakes were just grand — no recipe at all, just Mrs. Cridge’s common sense and good will and nice material.)

MY BACKYARD IS
wild. It is bounded by a board fence and a tangle of blackberry and loganberry vines, and the chicken house and shed, two plum trees and one apple, all heavy with fruit. Woo sits in one plum tree very content. The bantam cock and
hen have a little bower under some seeding parsnip tops. A great pile of wood is sunning itself, storing up glow for the winter grates. The big griffons are sprawled dead with sleep. The baby griffs are cutting teeth on each other’s ears; life is jokey with them. My pupil is scrubbing away, making a blue sky, two sunny houses, and a bit of plum tree. She is happy. I am trying to get behind her eyes and poke them out into space. The backyard is full of peace. No one overlooks me. Clean wash hangs high in neighbours’ yards. Sometimes a reel-line squeaks, a chicken clucks about an egg, or a man chops wood. No children play in the backyards. The vegetables grow there; the children play in the streets. There is quiet shady space under the fruit trees. Space is more real than objects.