So, to Ben dead was given more care, more time, more money than had ever been given to Ben living. His burial was a final gesture of irony and futility: an effort to compensate carrion death for the unpaid wage of life -- love and mercy. He had a grand funeral. All the Pentlands sent wreaths, and came with their separate clans, bringing along with their hastily assumed funeral manners a smell of recent business. Will Pentland talked with the men about politics, the war, and trade conditions, paring his nails thoughtfully, pursing his lips and nodding in his curiously reflective way, and occasionally punning with a birdy wink. His pleased self-laughter was mixed with Henry's loud guffaw. Pett, older, kinder, gentler than Eugene had ever seen her, moved about with a rustling of gray silk, and a relaxed bitterness. And Jim was there, with his wife, whose name Eugene forgot, and his four bright hefty daughters, whose names he confused, but who had all been to college and done well, and his son, who had been to a Presbyterian college, and had been expelled for advocating free love and socialism while editor of the college paper. Now he played the violin, and loved music, and helped his father with the business: he was an effeminate and mincing young man, but of the breed. And there was Thaddeus Pentland, Will's bookkeeper, the youngest and poorest of the three. He was a man past fifty, with a pleasant red face, brown mustaches, and a gentle placid manner. He was full of puns and pleased good-nature, save when he quoted from Karl Marx and Eugene Debs. He was a Socialist, and had once received eight votes for Congress. He was there with his garrulous wife (whom Helen called Jibber-Jibber) and his two daughters, languid good-looking blondes of twenty and twenty-four.

There they were, in all their glory -- that strange rich clan, with its fantastic mixture of success and impracticality, its hard monied sense, its visionary fanaticism. There they were, in their astonishing contradictions: the business man who had no business method, and yet had made his million dollars; the frantic antagonist of Capital who had given the loyal service of a lifetime to the thing he denounced; the wastrel son, with the bull vitality of the athlete, a great laugh, animal charm -- no more; the musician son, a college rebel, intelligent, fanatic, with a good head for figures; insane miserliness for oneself, lavish expenditure for one's children.

There they were, each with the familiar marking of the clan -- broad nose, full lips, deep flat cheeks, deliberate pursed mouths, flat drawling voices, flat complacent laughter. There they were, with their enormous vitality, their tainted blood, their meaty health, their sanity, their insanity, their humor, their superstition, their meanness, their generosity, their fanatic idealism, their unyielding materialism. There they were, smelling of the earth and Parnassus -- that strange clan which met only at weddings or funerals, but which was forever true to itself, indissoluble and forever apart, with its melancholia, its madness, its mirth: more enduring than life, more strong than death.

And as Eugene looked, he felt again the nightmare horror of destiny: he was of them -- there was no escape. Their lust, their weakness, their sensuality, their fanaticism, their strength, their rich taint, were rooted in the marrow of his bones.

But Ben, with the thin gray face (he thought) was not a part of them. Their mark was nowhere on him.

The women filled the house with their moaning. Eliza wept almost constantly; Helen by fits, in loose hysterical collapse. And all the other women wept with gusto, comforting Eliza and her daughter, falling into one another's arms, wailing with keen hunger. And the men stood sadly about, dressed in their good clothes, wondering when it would be over. Ben lay in the parlor, bedded in his expensive coffin. The room was heavy with the incense of the funeral bowers.

And among them, sick and old, leaning upon his cane, moved Gant, the alien, the stranger. He was lost and sorrowful, but sometimes, with a flash of his old rhetoric, he spoke of his grief and the death of his son.

To Eugene came again the old ghoul fantasy of a corpse and cold pork, the smell of the dead and hamburger steak -- the glozed corruption of Christian burial, the obscene pomps, the perfumed carrion. Slightly nauseated, he took his seat with Eliza in the carriage, and tried to think of supper.

Presently the Scotch minister arrived: his decent soul lay above all the loud posturings of grief like a bolt of hard clean wool. He began the service for the dead in a dry nasal voice, remote, monotonous, cold, and passionate.

The procession moved off briskly to the smooth trotting pull of the velvet rumps. The mourning women peered out of the closed carriages at the gaping town. They wept behind their heavy veils, and looked to see if the town was watching. Behind the world's great mask of grief, the eyes of the mourners shone through with a terrible and indecent hunger, an unnameable lust.

Then, marshalled by Horse Hines, the pallbearers, young men from the paper and the town, who had known the dead man best, moved slowly out, gripping the coffin-handles with their nicotined fingers. In proper sequence, the mourners followed, lengthening out in closed victorias that exhaled their funeral scent of stale air and old leather.

It was raw October weather -- gray and wet. The service had been short, as a precaution against the pestilence which was everywhere. The funeral entered the cemetery. It was a pleasant place, on a hill. There was a good view of the town. As the hearse drove up, two men who had been digging the grave, moved off. The women moaned loudly when they saw the raw open ditch.

Then the mourners got back into their carriages and were driven briskly away. There was a fast indecent hurry about their escape. The long barbarism of burial was at an end. As they drove away, Eugene peered back through the little glass in the carriage. The two grave-diggers were already returning to their work. He watched until the first shovel of dirt had been thrown into the grave. He saw the raw new graves, the sere long grasses, noted how quickly the mourning wreaths had wilted. Then he looked at the wet gray sky. He hoped it would not rain that night.

Slowly the coffin was lowered onto the bands that crossed the grave.

Again Eugene heard the nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The boy's mind fumbled at little things. Horse Hines bent ceremoniously, with a starched crackle of shirt, to throw his handful of dirt into the grave. "Ashes to ashes --" He reeled and would have fallen in if Gilbert Gant had not held him. He had been drinking. "I am the resurrection and the life --" Helen wept constantly, harshly and bitterly. "He that believeth in me --" The sobs of the women rose to sharp screams as the coffin slid down upon the bands into the earth.

It was over. The carriages split away from the procession. The men dropped off in the town at the newspaper office, the pharmacy, the cigar-store. The women went home. No more. No more.

"You're the one who always has to be the goat," said Hugh Barton sourly. "I'm getting tired of it. That's what has worn you out. If they don't leave you alone, I'm going to take you away from here."

Night came, the bare swept streets, the gaunt winds. Helen lay before a fire in Hugh Barton's home. She had a bottle of chloroform liniment in her hand. She brooded morbidly into the fire, reliving the death a hundred times, weeping bitterly and becoming calm again.

"When I think of it, I hate her. I shall never forget. And did you hear her? Did you? Already she's begun to pretend how much he loved her. But you can't fool me! I know! He wouldn't have her around. You saw that, didn't you? He kept calling for me. I was the only one he'd let come near him. You know that, don't you?"

Then he went back to his charts and pamphlets, frowning importantly over a cigar, and scrawling figures on an old envelope with a stub of pencil gripped between his fingers.

Then, hearing the sharp whine of the wind, she wept again.

She was silent for a moment, staring at the fire.

"After this, I'm through," she said. "They can get along for themselves. Hugh and I have a right to our own lives. Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Eugene. I'm merely the chorus, he thought.

Her voice had a note of exasperation in it. They all felt the grim trickery of Death, which had come in by the cellar while they waited at the window.

"Poor old Ben," she said. "I can't bear to think of him out there to-night."

She has him trained, too, Eugene thought.

"Papa's not going to die," she went on. "I've nursed him like a slave for six years, and he'll be here when I'm gone. Every one was expecting papa to die, but it was Ben who went. You never can tell. After this, I'm through."

"Papa has no right to expect it of me!" she burst out resentfully. "He's had his life. He's an old man. We have a right to ours as well as any one. Good heavens! Can't they realize that! I'm married to Hugh Barton! I'm HIS wife!"

Are you? thought Eugene. Are you?

O but I can't go now, said Eugene to it. (Why not? it whispered.) Because her face is so white, and her forehead is so broad and high, with the black hair drawn back from it, and when she sat there at the bed she looked like a little child. I can't go now and leave her here alone. (She is alone, it said, and so are you.) And when she purses up her mouth and stares, so grave and thoughtful, she is like a little child. (You are alone now, it said. You must escape, or you will die.) It is all like death: she fed me at her breast, I slept in the same bed with her, she took me on her trips. All of that is over now, and each time it was like a death. (And like a life, it said to him. Each time that you die, you will be born again. And you will die a hundred times before you become a man.) I can't! I can't! Not now -- later, more slowly. (No. Now, it said.) I am afraid. I have nowhere to go. (You must find the place, it said.) I am lost. (You must hunt for yourself, it said.) I am alone. Where are you? (You must find me, it said.)

But Eliza sat before the fire at Dixieland with hands folded, reliving a past of tenderness and love that never had been. And as the wind howled in the bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and bitter spirit, the bright and stricken thing in the boy twisted about in horror, looking for escape from the house of death. No more! No more! (it said). You are alone now. You are lost. Go find yourself, lost boy, beyond the hills.

This little bright and stricken thing stood up on Eugene's heart and talked into his mouth.

Then he saw the fear in her eyes, and the grave troubled child's stare. He rushed to where she sat and grasped her hand. She held him tightly and laid her face against his arm.

"-- and I said, 'Why, what on earth, boy, you want to dress up warm around your neck or you'll catch your death of cold.'"

Eugene caught at his throat and plunged for the door.

"I've got to go," he said in a choking voice. "I've got to get away from here."

Then, as the bright thing twisted about in him, Eugene heard the whine of the bleak wind about the house that he must leave, and the voice of Eliza calling up from the past the beautiful lost things that never happened.

Eliza wept bitterly.

"Yes, mama," he said, falling to his knees. "Yes, mama." He hugged her to him frantically. "Yes, mama. God bless you, mama. It's all right, mama. It's all right."

"Don't go yet," she said. "You've all your life ahead of you. Stay with me just a day or two."

"I'm an old woman," she said, "and one by one I've lost you all. He's dead now, and I never got to know him. O son, don't leave me yet. You're the only one that's left: you were my baby. Don't go! Don't go." She laid her white face against his sleeve.

"Here, boy! Where are you going?" said Eliza, looking up quickly.

He turned into an unpaved road by the big wooden sanitarium. He heard the rich kitchen laughter of the negroes, the larded sizzle of food, the dry veranda coughing of the lungers.

It is not hard to go (he thought). But when can we forget?

It was October and the leaves were quaking. Dusk was beginning. The sun had gone, the western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western sky still burned with ragged bands of orange. It was October.

Eugene walked swiftly along the sinuous paved curves of Rutledge Road. There was a smell of fog and supper in the air: a warm moist blur at window-panes, and the pungent sizzle of cookery. There were mist-far voices, and a smell of burning leaves, and a warm yellow blur of lights.

He walked briskly along the lumpy road, with a dry scuffling of leaves. The air was a chill dusky pearl: above him a few pale stars were out. The town and the house were behind him. There was a singing in the great hill-pines.

Two women came down the road and passed him. He saw that they were country women. They were dressed rustily in black, and one of them was weeping. He thought of the men who had been laid in the earth that day, and of all the women who wept. Will they come again? he wondered.

"Good-evening, Mrs. Pert," said Eugene.

When he came to the gate of the cemetery he found it open. He went in quickly and walked swiftly up the winding road that curved around the crest of the hill. The grasses were dry and sere; a wilted wreath of laurel lay upon a grave. As he approached the family plot, his pulse quickened a little. Some one was moving slowly, deliberately, in among the grave-stones. But as he came up he saw that it was Mrs. Pert.

"It's 'Gene," he said.

"Oh, is it Old 'Gene?" she said. "How are you, 'Gene?"

"Who is it?" she asked, peering murkily. She came to him with her grave unsteady step.

"Pretty well," he said. He stood awkwardly, chilled, not knowing how to continue. It was getting dark. There were long lonely preludes to winter in the splendid pines, and a whistling of wind in the long grasses. Below them, in the gulch, night had come. There was a negro settlement there -- Stumptown, it was called. The rich voices of Africa wailed up to them their jungle dirge.

But in the distance, away on their level and above, on other hills, they saw the town. Slowly, in twinkling nests, the lights of the town went up, and there were frost-far voices, and music, and the laughter of a girl.

"This is a nice place," said Eugene. "You get a nice view of the town from here."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pert. "And Old Ben's got the nicest place of all. You get a better view right here than anywhere else. I've been here before in the daytime." In a moment she went on. "Old Ben will turn into lovely flowers. Roses, I think."

She stood looking about fuzzily for a moment, with the blurred gentle smile on her lips.

"Alone? I've got Old 'Gene and Old Ben here, haven't I?" she said.

"It is getting dark, Mrs. Pert," said Eugene hesitantly. "Are you out here alone?"

"No," said Eugene, "dandelions -- and big flowers with a lot of thorns on them."

"Fatty can go by herself," she said with dignity. "Don't worry, 'Gene. I'll leave you alone."

"Maybe we'd better go back, Mrs. Pert?" he said. "It's going to turn cold to-night. I'll go with you."

"That's all right," said Eugene, confused. "We both came for the same reason, I suppose."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pert. "Who'll be coming here this time next year, I wonder? Will Old 'Gene come back then?"

"I'm going to live with my daughter in Tennessee. You didn't know Fatty was a grandmother, did you?" she said, with her soft blurred smile. "I've a little grandson two years old."

"I'm sorry to see you go," Eugene said.

"No," said Eugene. "No, Mrs. Pert. I shall never come here again."

"Nor I, 'Gene," she said. "When do you go back to school?"

"Then Fatty will have to say good-bye," she said reproachfully. "I'm going away too."

"Where are you going?" he asked, surprised.

Mrs. Pert was silent a moment, rocking vaguely upon her feet.

"To-morrow," he said.

"He had pneumonia, Mrs. Pert," said Eugene.

"What did they say was wrong with Ben?" she asked.

"Oh, pneumonia! That's it!" She nodded her head wisely as if satisfied. "My husband's a drug salesman, you know, but I never can remember all the things that people have. Pneumonia."

She was silent again, reflecting.

"And when they shut you up in a box and put you in the ground, the way they did Old Ben, what do they call that?" she asked with a soft inquiring smile.

"They call that death, Mrs. Pert."

He did not laugh.

"Yes," said Eugene. "I know that, Mrs. Pert."

"Death! Yes, that's it," said Mrs. Pert brightly, nodding her head in agreement. "That's one kind, 'Gene. There are some other lands, too. Did you know that?" She smiled at him.

"Good-bye, my dear," she said. "We both knew Ben, didn't we? God bless you."

She stretched out her hands suddenly to him, and clasped his cold fingers. She did not smile any more.

Then she turned and walked away down the road, at her portly uncertain gait, and was lost in the gathering dark.

The great stars rode proudly up into heaven. And just over him, just over the town, it seemed, there was one so rich and low he could have touched it. Ben's grave had been that day freshly sodded: there was a sharp cold smell of earth there. Eugene thought of Spring, and the poignant and wordless odor of the elvish dandelions that would be there. In the frosty dark, far-faint, there was the departing wail of a whistle.

And suddenly, as he watched the lights wink cheerfully up in the town, their warm message of the hived life of men brought to him a numb hunger for all the words and the faces. He heard the far voices and laughter. And on the distant road a powerful car, bending around the curve, cast over him for a second, over that lonely hill of the dead, its great shaft of light and life. In his numbed mind, which for days now had fumbled curiously with little things, with little things alone, as a child fumbles with blocks or with little things, a light was growing.

Wind pressed the boughs, the withered leaves were shaking. It was October, but the leaves were shaking. A star was shaking. A light was waking. Wind was quaking. The star was far. The night, the light. The light was bright. A chant, a song, the slow dance of the little things within him. The star over the town, the light over the hill, the sod over Ben, night over all. His mind fumbled with little things. Over us all is something. Star, night, earth, light… light… O lost!… a stone… a leaf… a door… O ghost!… a light… a song… a light… a light swings over the hill… over us all… a star shines over the town… over us all… a light.

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again. But over us all, over us all, over us all is -- something.

His mind gathered itself out of the wreckage of little things: out of all that the world had shown or taught him he could remember now only the great star above the town, and the light that had swung over the hill, and the fresh sod upon Ben's grave, and the wind, and far sounds and music, and Mrs. Pert.

A light swings over the hill. (We shall not come again.) And over the town a star. (Over us all, over us all that shall not come again.) And over the day the dark. But over the darkness -- what?

Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were shaking. It was October, but some leaves were shaking.

Over the dawn a lark. (That shall not come again.) And wind and music far. O lost! (It shall not come again.) And over your mouth the earth. O ghost! But, over the darkness -- what?

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again. It was October, but we never shall come back again.

When will they come again? When will they come again?

Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were quaking.

The laurel, the lizard, and the stone will come no more. The women weeping at the gate have gone and will not come again. And pain and pride and death will pass, and will not come again. And light and dawn will pass, and the star and the cry of a lark will pass, and will not come again. And we shall pass, and shall not come again.

It had grown dark. The frosty night blazed with great brilliant stars. The lights in the town shone with sharp radiance. Presently, when he had lain upon the cold earth for some time, Eugene got up and went away toward the town.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

What things will come again? O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of the seasons, will come again. And the strange and buried men will come again, in flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again, and death and the dust will never come again, for death and the dust will die. And Ben will come again, he will not die again, in flower and leaf, in wind and music far, he will come back again.

Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were shaking.