FullReads

“Read it, I’m dazed, I can’t see it rightly.”

The big man stops whistling and looks curiously at her. She is perfectly sober; the flush has ceded to a lead-white pallor, and her face twitches convulsively. She stands absolutely still, with her hands hanging heavily down, though she is devoured with impatience. The little man wipes his hands, and takes out his spectacles, and reads slowly:

“Susie dying, come at once, no hope. Expecting you since Saturday, wrote twice.”

A minute’s silence–then a hoarse scream that seems to come from the depths of her chest; it frightens both men, so that the big man drops a brick, and a carpenter in the house comes to the window and looks out.

“Since Saturday!” she cries, “today is Wednesday. When was it sent, tell me!” she shakes the little man in her excitement, and he scans the form slowly, with the deliberation of his class:

“Stratford, 7:45.”

“But the date! the date, man!”

“The 20th.”

“Today,” with a groan, “is the 22nd. So it come Monday, and today is Wednesday, an’ they wrote twice. It must ‘ave come when I fetched ‘is beer, an’ ‘e kept it. But the letters?–that little cub, that sneak of ‘ell! Aah, wait!” She calls down curses with such ferocity of expression that the men shiver; then crushing the fateful paper inside the bosom of her gown, she rushes back, and in a few minutes they see her come out, tying on her bonnet as she runs.

“Well, this ‘ere’s a rum go, eh?” says the big man, regaining his colour, “an’ ooze Susie?”

The little man says nothing, only balances a brick in the palm of his hand before he fits it into its place, but his lips move silently.

In the parlour of one of a row of stiff two-storied houses, with narrow hall-doors in a poor street in Stratford, a little coffin painted white is laid on the table that is covered with a new white sheet.

There are plenty of flowers, from the white wreath sent by the grocer’s wife, with a card bearing “From a Sympathiser” in big silver letters, to the penny bunch of cornflowers of a playmate.

Susie has her tiny hands folded, and the little waxen face looks grey and pinched amongst the elaborately pinked-out glazed calico frills of her coffin lining. There is the unavoidable air of festivity that every holiday, even a sad one, imparts to a working-man’s home. The children have their hair crimped and their Sunday clothes on, for they are going to the burial-ground in a grand coach with black horses and long tails, and they sit on the stairs and talk it over in whispers.

The men have come in at dinner-hour silently and stolidly, and looked at her, and gone out to the “Dog and Jug” for a glass of beer to wash down whatever of sadness the sight of dead Susie may have roused in them.

Every woman in the row has had a cup of tea, and told of her own sorrows; related the death of every relative she has ever possessed, to the third and fourth degree, with the minuteness of irrelevant detail peculiar to her class. Every incident of Susie’s death-struggle has been described with such morbid or picturesque addition as frequent rehearsals, or the fancy of the narrator, may suggest. Every corner of the house is crammed with people, for the funeral is to leave at three o’clock.

“Looks like satin it do, it’s as pretty as ever I see!” pointing to the pinking, says one woman.

“Yes, Mr. Triggs thought a ‘eap o’ Susie, an’ ‘e took extry pains.’E’s a beautiful undertaker, an’ ‘e’s goin’ to send the ‘earse with the wite plumes! Don’t she just look a little hangel?”