Chapter 1 - Page 2

life that there was something one had to
do for them. They were there in their simplified intensified
essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as
personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb. When all
sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their
purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that
they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day,
of the hard usage of life. They had no organised service, no
reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety. Even ungenerous
people provided for the living, but even those who were called most
generous did nothing for the others. So on George Stransom's part
had grown up with the years a resolve that he at least would do
something, do it, that is, for his own - would perform the great
charity without reproach. Every man HAD his own, and every man
had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of the soul.

It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best;
as the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular
communion with these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he
always called in his thoughts the Others. He spared them the
moments, he organised the charity. Quite how it had risen he
probably never could have told you, but what came to pass was that
an altar, such as was after all within everybody's compass, lighted
with perpetual candles and dedicated to these secret rites, reared
itself in his spiritual spaces. He had wondered of old, in some
embarrassment, whether he had a religion; being very sure, and not
a little content, that he hadn't at all events the religion some of
the people he had known wanted him to have. Gradually this
question was straightened out for him: it became clear to him that
the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been
simply the religion of the Dead. It suited his inclination, it
satisfied his spirit, it gave employment to his piety. It answered
his love of great offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no
shrine could be more bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than
those to which his worship was attached. He had no imagination
about these things but that they were accessible to any one who
should feel the need of them. The poorest could build such temples
of the spirit - could make them blaze with candles and smoke with
incense, make them flush with pictures and flowers. The cost, in
the common phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly on the generous
heart.