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bearers take off their hats, and slowly and stumblingly all move
off up the slope on a mat of tan jute with two red stripes that
has been laid on the mud, and make their way among the
graves. Shabby ordinary people in their greatcoats and hats
of different colours, with their umbrellas and rubber storm
shoes, no one of them is much moved as they creep with their
dead man like tiny worms on the yellow sand beneath the sky.
When the poor black coffin has been put down on the canvas
bands of the wooden frame around the grave, all stand back
quietly while something that I cannot hear at my distance is
read or said. Some of the women sob out then. And the coffin
descends slowly from sight into the damp yellow sand.
Out at a distance over the swampy fields beyond the stream,
large black crows flap noisily around a lone tree; from a tiny
locomotive on railway trackage far away white steam rises with
a faint roar. The mist in the air is rapidly turning to falling
rain.
After a short pause the party straggles back to the coach,
some who have started first pausing to look at the other graves
and the dead flowers. A few remain for a moment by the open
grave looking down. But very soon all are again in their
places and the coach is rolling away among the slopes. It
passes out at the stone gate and back into the city. And then
old German labourers, who have been waiting not far off,
approach the grave rheumatically and set aside the few flowers
that have been left on the pile of fresh sand, which is partly
covered by a green waxed cloth and evergreen branches. They
put on and screw down the lid of the new wooden overbox;
earth is thrown in; and before the early gloomy rainy nightfall
the grave of Brother Frank Burns, Servant of the Lord, is
almost filled.
But I went from the place almost unmindful of the irony
of what had happened, almost unmindful of the night and the
mist and the vastness of the wet sky; so touching and agitating
had been that fair bright vain dream, that pure and simple
heart, advancing eager, strong, and radiant to conquer the
menacing shadows of life and death.
WILLIAM JITRO