NECROPOLIS

I have solemnly sworn my family that when I die I am not to be buried in a “Necropolis.” Horrible thought, a “city” of the dead! To hate the herd when living, and to be forcibly associated with it till the Day of Judgment, if not evicted to make room for fresh tenants!

In the very early months of my marriage we were obliged to take up our abode in a large northern town, for Loki’s future grandfather had to study certain aspects of newspaper management. Never was anything more difficult to find than a roof for our heads in that place of teeming activities. Worn out with a long and fruitless search we were at last landed in a higher quarter of the town at the house of a dentist! The dentist was going away for a holiday, and was ready to put at our disposal, for a consideration, the whole of the clean, fresh, quite unobjectionable little abode, reserving only one room—his chamber of horrors!

I interviewed an elderly thin-faced lady, with, as became a dentist’s mother, a very handsome smile. She brought me to the window. We looked down on waving tree-tops and a wide space of green in the gathering dusk of the September evening.

“You see,” she said, “we have a most pleasant view.”

I gazed. That stretch of green silence and restfulness, after all those sordid roaring streets, decided me.

“We will take the house!” I cried, in a hurry lest we should miss such a chance.

“I always think,” said the dentist’s mother, smiling still more broadly, “that it is a great advantage to be opposite the Necropolis.”

Poor innocent as I was, and country bred, I had no idea of the meaning of the word.

I was soon to discover. Funerals are of more than daily occurrence in a mighty city. Oh! the processions that I stared down upon from the drawing-room window, through the fog and the rain—gloom generally enveloped that centre of manufactures! I was left long hours alone; no one but an impertinent French maid with whom I could exchange my ideas. The proceedings in the Necropolis had a hypnotic attraction for me. I began to feel quite certain that it was gaping for my poor little bones, and that they must inevitably rest there. Finally, I extracted a solemn oath that, whatever happened, this should not be the case—a promise momentarily soothing, but far from lifting the weight of depression that pressed upon me.

To add a touch of revolting comedy to my experiences, the owner of the house returned abruptly from his holiday and took possession of the locked-up room for an afternoon, for the purpose of extracting all the teeth of a special friend. I fled from the house in terror, when Elise who hated me informed me with much gusto of the impending excitement. Needless to say, however, she regaled me with every groan on my return, and all the details she had been able to pick up from the parlourmaid—left by the dentist, en parenthÈse—who had counted the teeth.

The nightmare shrinking from death and its dreadful appanages is one that is mercifully passing from me. But I envy those who can take the great tragic facts of existence, not only with simplicity, but with a kind of enjoyable interest.

A Hungarian friend of ours derived much solace in the loss of an adored mother by the choosing of a coffin—“Louis XV, with little Watteau bows of ormolu.” She smiled with real joy, through her tears as she described the casket to us, adding:

“And I have chosen just such another for myself for ven I die!”

She stared in amazement when I remarked that I should not care what my coffin was like.

“Vat?” she exclaimed, “not like to be buried in a Vatteau coffin? But it is so pretty!”

Alas! she lies in her pretty coffin, and our world is much the poorer. But we are sure that during the long months of her last illness, when she shut herself away from every one in the solitude of her great Hungarian property, to face death alone, the thought of those Watteau bows was a distinct satisfaction.

Never was there a creature so instinct with life as she! It was little wonder she could not imagine herself as past caring for the small pleasures for which she had always had so keen a taste. She never lost the heart of a child. Though when last we saw her she must have been, as years go, almost an old woman, there was no touch of age about her: only a snowier white of her hair made her more like an adorable little Marquise than ever. Her pretty picturesque ways were unchanged, her eager sympathy, the delicious freshness of her mind, the lightness, the charm, the simplicity.

She had a soft oval face; rich southern tints; the bluest eyes between black lashes that it is possible to imagine; her small nose like a falcon’s beak—which gave a character of decision, an untamed, spirited look to the whole countenance. The word savage could not apply to anything so exquisitely dainty in manner and appearance; and yet one felt the long line of savage ancestry at the back of her, a wildness no other European nation would show in such a flower of its race. And, to finish the description, no one had ever so pretty a mouth with the smile of a child and a thousand fascinating expressions.

Life had dealt very hardly with her, as is sometimes the case with such buoyant souls. She lost all she loved, and was left in the end with half a province in land, and no creature nearer than the son of a second cousin to whom to bequeath the vast inheritance.

Wedded to an English officer in the Austrian service, while still in her teens, one might have thought she would have had a better chance of domestic bliss than if her choice had fallen upon one of her own countrymen; since, above all in those middle Victorian days, the English home and the English virtues are so proverbial. But he was all that a husband ought not to be. And her only child died in babyhood. For thirty years she devoted herself in an alien land to what she conceived to be her duty. A fervent believer in the higher destinies of man and the necessity of repentance, she would say, “I will not give up Johnnie’s soul.”

The dashing Chevau-leger became an old curmudgeon of the crankiest description. To a less courageous spirit life would really have been intolerable beside him. Nevertheless the small London house near the Park, every window of which was bright with flower-boxes, was as gay within as it was without, and friends flocked to those Sunday tea-parties—the only entertainments she was permitted to give.

Well, she had the reward she craved. Johnnie “made his soul,” in Irish parlance, quite sufficiently long before softening of the brain became too marked to preclude intelligent action. And after three years more she was able to send that telegram to her intimates: “Released!” It was the cry of one who had been enslaved and in prison for all her youth and all her bright womanhood.

But, characteristically, “Johnnie’s” funeral was a matter of great importance. He had been very fond of driving four-in-hand, and so there were four horses to the hearse that conveyed all that was left of the Tyrant to Kensal Green. It was as splendid as lavish instructions could make it; and the little widow would pop her head out of the window at every turning to watch the noble appearance of the hearse with its nodding plumes and murmur contentedly:

“Poor Johnnie, he vas so fond of driving behind four horses: I vas determined he should have it for de last time!”

We were not a little startled to receive a postcard a few weeks later, containing the cryptic phrase:

“Just re-buried Johnnie!”

Johnnie had always been a trial of a unique description. Was it possible that he had put the laws of nature at defiance and returned to torment his long-suffering spouse? But the explanation was simple. She thought it so simple herself as to admit of its expression, as we have said, on a postcard.

When she had left him among all those ranks of dead, the thought came to her that he was dissatisfied with his resting-place and would prefer to be laid with his ancestors. And so Johnnie was promptly dug up from where he had been deposited with so much pomp, removed across half England, and “reburied.”

If it was true that, like so many ghosts, he was particular about his tomb, I can quite understand his displeasure in this instance. As I have said, I share it.

He lies now just outside the park where he played as a child, under the lee of the little church where he said his first innocent prayers, and his dust will mingle with the dust of his grandsires.

Such a quiet, peaceful spot! Immense cornfields skirt it on the one hand and on the other the great woods.

May I lie in some such hallowed, uncrowded acre!