IN THE UNDERTAKER’S SHOP

SOME time ago I went down town to buy a coffin. No, I didn’t say that to be startling; it is merely a bald, literal statement of fact. Now and then one goes down town to buy a book, or a pair of gloves, or some postage stamps. On this occasion I went to buy a coffin.

The conventional idea of grief is that it is an exclusive emotion; that it leaves no room in the mind, for the time being, for any other. Like most of our beliefs, and most of them are erroneous, we have derived this one from books and newspapers. “Mrs. So-and-so bore up bravely to the end, but is now under the care of a physician, and is completely prostrated by grief,” one almost always reads in a newspaper account of the last hours of that altogether estimable citizen, her husband. And she sincerely believes this—believes it even while she stands in front of the glass, telling the young woman from the dry-goods shop that the veil hasn’t been pinned on straight and that the skirt is at least three inches too long in the back. There is no hypocrisy here; she does feel acutely and deeply bereaved. But she is by no means completely prostrated, and there is plenty of place in her intelligence for a variety of sensations that have little or nothing to do with her sorrow. In fact, physicians tell me that persons in ordinary “good health” are very rarely prostrated by grief; that when they are, complete prostration, on the part of gentlemen, is generally traceable to too many drinks of whisky, and on the part of ladies, to the morphine pill of the family doctor.

Some persons are so constituted that even in the case of their own trouble they can appreciate this; other persons can’t. I happen to be one of the kind who can, so when I went into the undertaker’s shop, it was, after the first rather dreadful moment, easy and natural for me to regard the place and what I saw and heard there impersonally and with interest.

This was the less difficult, perhaps, from the fact that for several minutes I was alone, there was no one to attend to me and I had time to sit down and look about me—to collect myself and begin to wonder why the person whose establishment it was, was called an “undertaker,” in the first place. It is really a comic, a grotesque word, whether it means that the man to whom it applies merely “undertakes” in a general sense, or more specifically, undertakes to take one under. I decided to look this matter up in a dictionary when I went home, but I neglected to, of course, and it is still one of those philological mysteries through which we write and speak and have our being. I had time also to discover just why these places, quite aside from their associations, are in themselves always so hideous, so offensive, so utterly repellent. It is simply because they express in terms of furniture the characteristics and point of view of the always very unpleasant persons who conduct them. A being from another planet ought to be able to reconstruct an American undertaker merely by examining the furniture of the front room in which he transacts his business.

The locale of other trades and professions usually expresses some one thing, and nothing else. The offices of lawyers, stockbrokers and architects, for instance, suggest only the law, finance and construction. There is about them an intelligible directness, an admirable singleness of purpose. You know just where you are, and they admit of no emotional intricacies between you and the men you consult there. An undertaker’s office, on the other hand, is a piece of elaborate hypocrisy. It deprecatingly shrinks from admitting that it is one thing or the other. Over one of the most rapacious trades in all this sad world it seeks to draw a veil of domesticity and religion. One is repelled by the place because it is so deliberately false.

In it there is always the apparatus of business—telephones and a roll-top desk full of billheads and ledgers and writing materials. That corner of the room is practical to a degree. But there are always, as well, several rocking-chairs with “tidies,” half a dozen dreary palms and ferns, a few pictures of a semi-devotional nature in somber frames, and, if it can possibly be managed, an imitation stained-glass window. The rocking-chairs, the tidies, the dusty green things, the pictures, the colored glass are there to “soften the blow,” to extend a kind of mute sympathy, to make you feel that your relations with the place are not entirely sordid and commercial. On a table there is literature, but lest it should strike in one’s affliction a false and jarring note, it is invariably confined to last year’s reports, bound in dark-gray paper, of the trustees of local cemeteries. To one’s intelligence it is all very insulting.

So, also, was the manner of the abhorrent young man who presently appeared through a curtained doorway in the rear of the particular establishment I happened to be visiting. In the room beyond he had been whistling, as he approached, a popular two-step, but he instantly ceased when he saw me and unconsciously drawing his face into a wan, smitten smile, came forward noiselessly, almost on tiptoe. He would have shaken hands with a slight, prolonged pressure full of regret and comprehension if I had let him, but I saw it coming and putting my hand in my pocket allowed his to drop back with a sad gesture that sought to say: “Yes—yes, I understand.”

“I should like to look at coffins,” I remarked, and then coldly eyed his discomfiture. For it was clearly not the sort of beginning he had expected. I had been prosaic and unmoved, and the fact left him for a moment with his trained sympathy, his professional manner, on his hands so to speak. He didn’t exactly know what to do with it, and he couldn’t quite bring himself, all at once, to risk anything else. In the meantime I merely looked at him.

“Mr. Murksom” (Mr. Murksom was the proprietor; they always have names like that) “has stepped out for a few minutes, but he’s coming right back,” the young man at last explained in tones that tried to be commonplace like my own. But I could see how difficult it was for him to be commonplace under the circumstances. Separated from its traditional and odious technique, the pursuit of his vocation plainly seemed to him neither legitimate nor altogether decent. “Mr. Murksom is very helpful,” he added in a refined whisper, delicately averting his eyes. He had relapsed again into the “manner”; he just couldn’t help it. It was as if he had said: “Even if for some perverse reason you refuse to act your part, it will never be said of me that I have failed in mine.”

“Won’t you—rest,” he then suggested, indicating one of the rocking-chairs; and I realized, with an all but uncontrollable desire to laugh aloud, that the slight hesitation followed by the mortuary word “rest,” was his tribute to my presumable and complete prostration. I took possession of the rocking-chair, but he sat down on an angular piece of “mission” work, with a straight back, and then brought the tips of his fingers together in a fashion that positively murmured, but without the crudity of words: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.”

“Will you have a cigarette?” I brutally inquired, for I was about to smoke one myself. And this, I saw with relief, for the time being, definitely broke the spell. With a cigarette in his mouth, or between his fingers, it was impossible, even for him, to produce any of his effects. He gave up trying to, and we talked. Among other things, I asked him, while I waited for the return of Mr. Murksom, how he had come to choose his occupation. All my life I had wanted to ask an undertaker that, but I never before had been given so good an opening. His reply was interesting, as, indeed, I knew it would be, or I shouldn’t have asked the question.

“I didn’t exactly choose it,” he replied. “I don’t think anybody ever does. It isn’t the kind of a job a person really chooses. I just drifted into it, little by little. That’s what they all do, I think. I had a friend who used to drive the wagon, and sometimes when he had to go very far, I’d go along with him to keep him company and hold the horses while he was inside. You get to talking, sometimes, and when you talk about things you kind of get used to them. After awhile they seem natural. Sometimes, when my friend had things to do here at the office, I used to help him; you might just as well, as to sit around doing nothing. And then someone offers you a job, and as you know a good deal about it by that time, and don’t mind, you take it. You kind of get into it by degrees.”

Just here Mr. Murksom appeared, and I saw at a glance that beneath his spurious melancholy one might never penetrate. He had been at it for too many years. The professional manner, thick and unctuous, enveloped him. He couldn’t have abandoned it had he wanted to. It clung to him, I was sure, at the lightest moments of his life. Of course, it was impossible to imagine his life as having any light moments, but assuming that such a thing could be, I felt that gayety with him would vaguely approximate only the gayety of a flag at half-mast. He would have approached the back platform of a street car in precisely the same soundless, sympathetic, discreetly afflicted way in which he approached a sobbing widow. It was the way, moreover, in which he at once approached me. I had craftily evaded the hand of his assistant, but there was no escaping the condoling pressure of Mr. Murksom. It had sought my own and gently, lugubriously squeezed it before I had been able to take defensive measures, and it did not, although I tried to drop it, immediately relax. In fact, it held on, and, with a kind of ghoulish authority, led me across the room and through the curtained doorway in the rear. The creature had divined everything; he knew exactly why I had come long before I had arrived to tell him. As I was drawn into the inner room I recalled the phrase “hand in glove,” and it occurred to me that Mr. Murksom was quite unavoidably the glove upon the hand of God. I heard him sigh most convincingly on two notes, and although he didn’t say anything continuous or even very coherent, I seemed to catch the words “very sad,” and “always a shock, even when expected.”

Once beyond the curtained doorway, I disengaged myself and again declared that I wished to look at coffins; but the manner in which Mr. Murksom, from then on, combined the shrewd salesman with the spiritual consoler is something my feeble pen altogether balks at recording. As far as I could see, there were no coffins in the room in which I had expected to find an embarrassment of choice, but, resting a protecting palm upon my shoulder as if to shield me from a sudden shock, Mr. Murksom pressed a button in the room’s white paneling, and lo! a natty three hundred and fifty-dollar receptacle turned a sort of somersault and landed, so to speak, at our feet. It was exactly like opening, or letting down, the upper berth in a sleeping car, except that these berths were on end instead of on their sides. Before I had made up my mind, we had pressed buttons and lowered upper berths all around three sides of the room.

“Now, just what is the difference between this one, which costs two hundred, and that one, which is only ninety-eight?” I inquired, for to me they both looked very much alike.

“This one,” Mr. Murksom replied, and I could see he thought me a haggling, heartless person, “is something more—more permanent. That one won’t—well, that one is, as one might say, less able to withstand the—the inevitable conditions. Personally,” he, to my surprise, hastened to add, “I don’t wish for anything too permanent. ‘Dust to dust,’ you know,” he murmured, as he pressed another button. This, I confess, surprised me very much, for it seemed to me that anyone who, for years and years, had buried several persons a day would necessarily fall into the habit of considering himself immortal. For a moment I thought of drawing him out on the subject; it occurred to me that a man whose whole life consisted of death ought to have made some illuminating reflections. Indeed, after I finally accomplished what I had come for, I did begin to ask a question, but was interrupted in the middle of it. For the young man suddenly appeared in the curtained doorway with something wrapped in brown paper and tied with a pink string. He was not exactly excited, he never could have been that, but he was, at least, natural. After our little conversation, I think he had concluded that there wasn’t much point in keeping it up any longer with me. This, at any rate, is the only way in which I could account for his ignoring my presence to the extent of making, in a moment, a most extraordinary and startling announcement. He held the brown paper parcel toward Mr. Murksom, who had turned inquiringly toward him, and then exclaimed, with a pleased smile:

“They’ve found those legs.”

“Ah,” sighed Mr. Murksom, “and where were they?”

“In the wagon all the time. The horses just walked away from the house and a policeman stopped them as they were trying to get into a vacant lot to eat grass. Well,” he ended, in a gratified tone, “I’m glad they found those legs.”

At this, I somewhat hurriedly said good afternoon, and withdrew. They were very little legs. I read about them in the paper the next day.