The Major stood up with alacrity.

“I’ll stay, if I may,” said Frank.

“Very well.  Then I’ll take Mr. Trustcott upstairs.”

* * * * *

Half an hour later the ceremony began.

Here, I simply despair of description.  I know something of what Frank witnessed and perceived, for I have been present myself at this affair in a religious house; but I do not pretend to be able to write it down.

First, however, there was the external, visible, audible service:  the catafalque, a bier-like erection, all black and yellow, guarded by yellow flames on yellow candles—­the grave movements, the almost monstrous figures, the rhythm of the ceremonies, and the wail of, the music of forty voices singing as one—­all that is understood....

But the inner side of these things—­the reverse of which these things are but a coarse lining, the substance of which this is a shadow—­that is what passes words and transcends impressions.

It seemed to Frank that one section, at any rate, of that enormous truth at which he had clutched almost blindly when he had first made his submission to the Church—­one chamber in that House of Life—­was now flung open before him, and he saw in it men as trees walking....  He was tired and excited, of course; he was intensely imaginative; but there are some experiences that a rise of temperature cannot explain and that an imagination cannot originate....

For it seemed to him that here he was aware of an immeasurable need to which those ministrations were addressed, and this whole was countless in its units and clamant in its silence.  It was as a man might see the wall of his room roll away, beyond which he had thought only the night to lie, and discern a thronging mass of faces crying for help, pressing upon him, urging, yet all without sound or word.  He attempts in his diary to use phrases for all this—­he speaks of a pit in which is no water, of shadows and forms that writhe and plead, of a light of glass mingled with fire; and yet of an inevitability, of a Justice which there is no questioning and a Force that there is no resisting.  And, on the other side, there was this help given by men of flesh and blood like himself—­using ceremonies and gestures and strange resonant words....  The whole was as some enormous orchestra—­there was the wail on this side, the answer on that—­the throb of beating hearts—­there were climaxes, catastrophes, soft passages, and yet the result was one vast and harmonious whole.

It was the catafalque that seemed to him the veiled door to that other world that so manifested itself—­seen as he saw it in the light of the yellow candles—­it was as the awful portal of death itself; beneath that heavy mantle lay not so much a Body of Humanity still in death, as a Soul of Humanity alive beyond death, quick and yet motionless with pain.  And those figures that moved about it, with censor and aspersorium, were as angels for tenderness and dignity and undoubted power.  They were men like himself, yet they were far more; and they, too, one day, like himself, would pass beneath that pall and need the help of others that should follow them....