Reviving a little, she embraced me, said, ‘You knew him well, dear
Master Uncommercial, and he knew you!’ and fainted again: which,
as the rest of the Coat of Arms soothingly said, ‘done her credit.’
Now, I knew that she needn’t have fainted unless she liked, and
that she wouldn’t have fainted unless it had been expected of her,
quite as well as I know it at this day. It made me feel
uncomfortable and hypocritical besides. I was not sure but that it
might be manners in ME to faint next, and I resolved to keep my eye
on Flanders’s uncle, and if I saw any signs of his going in that
direction, to go too, politely. But Flanders’s uncle (who was a
weak little old retail grocer) had only one idea, which was that we
all wanted tea; and he handed us cups of tea all round,
incessantly, whether we refused or not. There was a young nephew
of Flanders’s present, to whom Flanders, it was rumoured, had left
nineteen guineas. He drank all the tea that was offered him, this
nephew – amounting, I should say, to several quarts – and ate as
much plum-cake as he could possibly come by; but he felt it to be
decent mourning that he should now and then stop in the midst of a
lump of cake, and appear to forget that his mouth was full, in the
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contemplation of his uncle’s memory. I felt all this to be the
fault of the undertaker, who was handing us gloves on a tea-tray as
if they were muffins, and tying us into cloaks (mine had to be
pinned up all round, it was so long for me), because I knew that he
was making game. So, when we got out into the streets, and I
constantly disarranged the procession by tumbling on the people
before me because my handkerchief blinded my eyes, and tripping up
the people behind me because my cloak was so long, I felt that we
were all making game. I was truly sorry for Flanders, but I knew
that it was no reason why we should be trying (the women with their
heads in hoods like coal-scuttles with the black side outward) to
keep step with a man in a scarf, carrying a thing like a mourning
spy-glass, which he was going to open presently and sweep the
horizon with. I knew that we should not all have been speaking in
one particular key-note struck by the undertaker, if we had not
been making game. Even in our faces we were every one of us as
like the undertaker as if we had been his own family, and I
perceived that this could not have happened unless we had been
making game. When we returned to Sally’s, it was all of a piece.
The continued impossibility of getting on without plum-cake; the
ceremonious apparition of a pair of decanters containing port and
sherry and cork; Sally’s sister at the tea-table, clinking the best
crockery and shaking her head mournfully every time she looked down
into the teapot, as if it were the tomb; the Coat of Arms again,
and Sally as before; lastly, the words of consolation administered
to Sally when it was considered right that she should ‘come round
nicely:’ which were, that the deceased had had ‘as com-for-ta-ble a
fu-ne-ral as comfortable could be!’
Other funerals have I seen with grown-up eyes, since that day, of
which the burden has been the same childish burden. Making game.
Real affliction, real grief and solemnity, have been outraged, and
the funeral has been ‘performed.’ The waste for which the funeral
customs of many tribes of savages are conspicuous, has attended
these civilised obsequies; and once, and twice, have I wished in my
soul that if the waste must be, they would let the undertaker bury
the money, and let me bury the friend.
In France, upon the whole, these ceremonies are more sensibly
regulated, because they are upon the whole less expensively
regulated. I cannot say that I have ever been much edified by the
custom of tying a bib and apron on the front of the house of