LITMIR.BIZ

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      Let’s admit it, in all our activities, golf and war, politics and religion, there is an element of childishness. Truly adult persons are as rare as saints. There was only one at the grave that sunny September afternoon: the woman in the coffin, my Kate, dead from cancer, bravely and humorously endured.

      Take the minister, the Rev. Dugald Abercrombie, white-haired and gaunt, with an involuntary girn in his voice. After half a century of having his exhortations politely disregarded, he could not help sounding disappointed and a little resentful. His joints were inflamed and painful with rheumatism. He had lost his own wife eight years ago. He thought he had deserved better, like a child that had always done what it was told. God, the Father, had let him down.

      There was Kate’s brother, Hector of the doleful countenance. Fifty or so years ago, he had gone to prison rather than be sent to war. No man ever knows exactly his own motives, but surely Hector – absurd name for a pacifist – must have been deceiving himself when he had declared, unavailingly as it turned out, that, by refusing to kill the persecutors of the Jews, he had been benefiting all humanity. Nowadays he lived alone with a horde of cats and kept a second-hand bookshop that seldom had customers. Looked at in one way, his qualms were noble, but looked at in another way, childish. Really, as I had once pointed out to him, he had spent his life in a puerile huff. Even Kate, most loving of sisters, had been impatient with him at times. He was missing her, though. Those tears were genuine. I loved him for them.

      There was Henry Sneddon, who had vowed never to speak to Hector, in this life or in any other life there might be.

      I had often rebuked him for what I called his unsoldierly lack of generosity. So had his wife Helen, most forgiving and least embittered of women. He was greatly dependent on her. At present, there she was, holding him up, though, at 78 she was a year older. Once, with great tenderness, she wiped his face, of slavers I thought, uncharitably, but it could have been tears; he too had been fond of Kate. No doubt Helen had arranged for him to use the minister’s private toilet in the kirk, if need be. Poor fellow, he claimed that his incontinence was the result of his having taken part in the Normandy landings 40 years ago.

      There was Susan Cramond, in her £1000 fur coat. A wealthy widow only a few weeks from her 70th birthday, she did cycling exercises, dieted, swallowed vitamins by the handful, consulted astrologers, wintered in the Bahamas, and bribed God with large donations to the church, all to fend off the old skinny fellow with the sharpened scythe. From the other side of the grave, she was gazing at me, in childish appeal. Would I, please, would anyone, save poor Susan? She had, I may say, a reputation in the town for being hard of head and heart. Could it be that she was afraid of hell, though outside the graveyard she’d scornfully tell you she didn’t believe in it?

      There were the Tullochs, Millie and Bill, she gazing up at him with cowlike meekness, he ignoring her as he so often did; he was usually punishing her for God knew

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