The Italian Girl Read Free Page B

shuffling, a heavy tread. As we all rose to our feet I half turned to see the little coffin entering, and it seemed suddenly sad that the hirelings who carried it so easily were equal in number to the real mourners. I shivered and closed my eyes as they passed me, and looked again to see the coffin reposing on a sort of stage in front of a blue velvet curtain. The music ceased, but continued in my head, making the silence idiotic. I looked at the coffin and sought for feelings, but could only feel that I was cold, very cold. It was as if she were for the last time waiting, that so demanding spirit turned upon the threshold, and we were there in front of her, an embarrassed, pitiful, half-witted crew, hang-dog as we had always been. At least a Christian burial would with ancient images and emotions have covered up this moment of blankness and lent to that querulous frailty the dignity and sadness of a general mortality. To this we all come. I wished, not for the first time, that I had been brought up as a Christian. Christianity was not inside me, for all that I sometimes aped it, and I knew the loss to be terrible. This was yet another thing for which I could not forgive my parents. I checked the old familiar resentment with the old familiar check. I stared at the blue velvet curtain. The silence went on and on.
    Then suddenly, just behind me, there was a weird sound. I saw Isabel turning sharply and I turned too. The coffin-bearers stood stiffly in a row at the back. In front of them was the huge figure of my brother, and as I turned I saw him swaying, bending forward and putting his hand to his mouth. I thought for a moment that he was ill or overcome by tears: but then I saw that he was laughing. Monstrous giggles shivered his great figure from head to foot and turned, as he tried to stifle them, into wet spluttering gurgles. ‘Oh God!’ said Otto audibly. He choked. Then abandoning all attempt at concealment he went off into a fit of gargantuan mirth. Tears of laughter wetted his red cheeks. He laughed. He roared. The chapel echoed with it. Our communion with Lydia was at an end.
    The line of coffin-bearers was in scandalized disorder. Isabel had stepped into the aisle and was saying something to me. I turned towards Otto. But already David Levkin had seized him by the arm and was marching him, still gasping and rumbling, towards the door. As I left my place to follow them out I saw, behind Isabel, Flora standing perfectly still, almost at attention, gazing straight in front of her as if nothing had happened.
    Outside Otto was now sitting on the stone steps in the sunshine repeating ‘Oh God, Oh my God!’ and wiping his mouth with a filthy handkerchief. He seemed quite unable to stop laughing. He would stop for a moment, stare in front of him with a humorous delighted expression, and then as if unable to endure the exquisitely comic nature of his thoughts, explode again into a roar. ‘Oh my God!’ His eyes were running with water and spittle foamed down his chin. Levkin was sitting on the step above him with his knee against Otto’s shoulder. He was patting him with a patient almost abstracted air. As I approached my brother I detected a strong smell of alcohol.
    Drunkenness disgusts me. I recalled now that Isabel had said in a letter some time ago that she thought that her husband was taking to drink: and I recalled how I had thought then that Otto, at best an uncontrolled and sometimes a violent man, would make a horrible drunkard. I looked down at him with repulsion.
    ‘My lord, my lord, be quiet, be still.’ Levkin was speaking to Otto, sing-song, caressing and soothing him. I looked at the boy with surprise and with an equal dislike.
    ‘Let’s get him to the car,’ I said, I detest scenes and drama. Fortunately there was no one about. The two cars stood but ten yards off and beyond them the green trees of the Garden of Remembrance were resinous and sleepy in the sun. The women had not emerged from the