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T. E. Lawrence, The Mint
PART III
9:
FUNERAL
It was
an odd morning, that on which we heard Queen Alexandra was dead. The fog
which collects here on most autumn mornings was so shallow. Across the
ground it lay like a veil: but when we looked up we could see a sparkle,
which hinted at a sun almost shining upon the eaves and mast-heads. When
we parade in fog, our figures go flat. There is no thickness, no
shadows, no high-light of polished buttons. Instead the fellows are as
if cut out of grey cardboard, with a darker tint drawn round the edges,
where the shafts of refracted light slip round them.
We
stood so, in our hollow square, this morning, while they hoisted colour,
and played the daily salute for the King: but after the salute they held
us at attention, ever so long in that dead shivering silence: for the
air was very sharp. Then the ensign began to creep downward from the
peak, while the massed drums of the band rolled. And they rolled and
rolled all the minutes that the flag crept down. At half-mast the
trumpets came out brazenly with the last post. We all swallowed our
spittle, chokingly, while our eyes smarted against our wills. A man
hates to be moved to folly by a noise.
They
would not let us off the worst of it. There had to be a parade service
the day she was buried. Our distrusted chaplain preached one of his
questionable sermons. He spoke of the dead Queen as a Saint, a Paragon:
not as an unfortunate, a long-suffering doll. With luscious mouth he
enlarged upon her beauty, the beauty which God, in a marvel of
loving-kindness, had let her keep until her dying.
My
thoughts fled back sharply to Marlborough House. The yellow, scaling
portal: the white-haired footmen and door-keepers, whiter than the
powder of their hair: the hushed great barn-like halls: the deep carpet
in which our feet dragged unwillingly to the ceiling-high fireplace
which dwarfed the whispering Miss Knollys and Sir Dighton. She
incredibly old, wasted, sallow: he a once huge man, whose palsied neck
had let down the great head on the breast, where its gaping mouth wagged
almost unseen and unheard in the thicket of beard which overgrew the
waistcoat. Sir Dighton had won the first V.C. in the Crimea: and he was
so old, and Miss Knollys so old that this seemed a cruel duty which kept
them always on their feet. We whispered with them: everybody whispered
in that charnel-house.
We had
to wait, of course: that is the prerogative of Queens. When we reached
the presence, and I saw the mummied thing, the bird-like head cocked on
one side, not artfully but by disease, the red-rimmed eyes, the
enamelled face, which the famous smile scissored across all angular and
heart-rending: - then I nearly ran away in pity. The body should not be
kept alive after the lamp of sense has gone out. There were the ghosts
of all her lovely airs, the little graces, the once-effective sway and
movement of the figure which had been her consolation. Her bony fingers,
clashing in the tunnel of their rings, fiddled with albums, penholders,
photographs, toys upon the table: and the heart-rending appeal played on
us like a hose, more and more terribly. She soon dismissed us.
These
memories lost me much of the sermon. I listened in again to hear the
chaplain telling the story of Prince Albert Edward in the House of Lords
warning Lord Granville he must miss part of his speech, because he had
promised to take his daughter to the circus. 'This,' declaimed the
padre, 'this was the domestic picture and example which the Prince and
Princess of Wales set their adoring people.' 'Balls!' hissed someone,
savagely, from behind me. In its thirty-second minute the sermon ended.
More rolling of drums and last posts, now firmly resisted by all of us
in our rage: and then back to dinner. 'Fall in at two for work!' shouted
the Orderly Sergeant. 'Not even a half-holiday for the old girl,'
grumbled Tug.
  
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