“You are not able.”

“Able is a word which I have eliminated from my vocabulary as applied to myself.”

The funeral, which was held the next afternoon in the parlor of the hotel, was at once a ghastly and a grotesque function.  The two doctors, the undertaker and his assistant, Georgie K. and the bar-tender, and Mrs. Slocum with a female friend, and a man, evidently the boarder to whom she had referred, were the only persons present.  The boarder wore a hat which had belonged to the dead man.  It was many sizes too large for his grayish blond, foolish little head, and, when he put it on, it nearly obscured his eyes.  Mrs. Slocum sniffed audibly through the service, which was short, being conducted by the old Presbyterian clergyman of Alton.  He hardly spoke above a whisper of “the stranger who had passed from our midst into the beyond.”  His concluding prayer was quite inaudible.  Mrs. Slocum had brought a bouquet of cheerful pink geraniums from her window plants, which on the top of the closed black casket made an odd spot of color and life in the dim room.  Among the blossoms were some rose-geranium leaves, whose fragrance seemed to mantle everything like smoke.  While the clergyman conducted the inaudible services loud voices were heard in the bar-room, and the yelp of a dog.  On one side of the house was the hush of death, on the other the din of life.  James wondered what the clergyman found to say:  all that he had distinguished was the expression, “The stranger within our midst.”

It all seemed horribly farcical to him.  The dead man in his casket had no personality for him; the sniffs of Mrs. Slocum, her boarder with the hat, assumed, in his eyes, the character of a “Punch and Judy” show.  But along with that feeling came the realization of a most terrible pathos.  He felt a sort of pity for the dead man, whose very personality had become nothing to him, and the pity was the greater because of that.  It became a pity for the very scheme of things, for man in the abstract, born perhaps, through no fault of his own, to sin and misery, both miserable and causing misery throughout his life, and then to end in the grave, and vanish from the sight and minds of other men.  He felt that it would not be so sad if it were sadder, if Mrs. Slocum’s sniffs had come from her heart, and not from her sentimentality.  He felt that a funeral where love is not is the most mournful function on earth.  Then, too, he felt a great anxiety for Doctor Gordon, who sat shrugged up in his gray overcoat, with his gray grizzle of beard meeting the collar, and his forehead heavily corrugated over pent and gloomy eyes.

He was heartily glad when the service was over, when the casket had been lowered into the grave, when the village hearse had turned off into a street, the horse going at a sharp trot, and he and Doctor Gordon were left alone.  He drove.  Gordon sat hunched into a corner of the buggy, as he had sat in the corner of the hotel parlor.  James hesitated about saying anything, but finally he spoke, he felt foolishly enough, although he meant the words to be comforting.  “You did all you could to save his life,” he said.