Following Darkness/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
It is difficult, as I have said, in looking back over those days, to see things in any fixed order. It is as if one's memories floated in a kind of haze, appearing and disappearing, melting into one another. But there is a definite point from which my story becomes consecutive, and I can carry it back as far as that cold, clear January morning, the morning of Mr. Carroll's funeral, when I stood beside my father, at some distance from the grave, among a group of people I did not know, and whom I should never see again. I examined them all with a mild and impartial curiosity, and was struck by the fact that none of them showed the slightest emotion, though all alike wore a grave and decorous demeanour. I could not blame them, for I did not feel sad myself. Mr. Carroll had always been perfectly amiable to me, but I had seen little of him, and when we did meet he had looked at me vaguely, as if he were unable to remember who I was. I had only known him as an invalid, occasionally hobbling about with the aid of two black, silver-headed sticks, but for the most part keeping pretty closely to his own rooms. He seemed to me to be very old, yet at his death I learned that he was not old at all, his appearance of decrepitude being simply the result of an excessively disorderly life, imposed upon a naturally wretched constitution. I learned, at the same time, the history of Mrs. Carroll's marriage; how, before the first year was out, she had ceased to see much of her husband, and a little later had ceased to see him altogether. It was fifteen years afterwards, when he had become the futile person I knew, that he had returned to her. As the coffin, bared of its covering of sickly-smell flowers, was lowered into the ugly, gaping grave, and the damp red earth rattled heavily on the lid with a hollow, brutal sound, I recalled the strange, white face, the watery blue eyes, the fixed smile, the soft, polite manner; but I was not in the least grieved to know I should never see them again. And when, a week or so later, I was once more in and out of the house just as of old, I had already ceased to think of him. Once or twice, passing the closed door of his room in the dusk, the thought of meeting his ghost, of hearing the tap, tap of his stick coming toward me down the long passage, gave me a momentary thrill; but even these poor tributes to his memory faded swiftly, passed into a total oblivion.