Free Brown on Resolution by C S Forester

appeared inhuman and unnatural. She was inert and dreamy. Opium had her; the doctors were kind. She would die the pleasant death of the poppy, and not that of the lunatic torture of cancer. Each succeeding visit of Albert’s found her muttering and silly. Towards the end pain reasserted itself. Opium began to lose its mastery, and little stabs of agony showed themselves on her face, and a surprised ejaculation or two broke through her mutterings. Yet Fate was kind enough; Agatha’s life went out of her while she floated above a vast grey sea sombrely tinted with opium, while around her loomed up the immense beetling silhouettes of the battle squadrons, the grey, craggy citadels of England’s glory and hope. Their funnel smoke swirled round her, veiling the worried freckled face of the child of her sin, and she smiled happily. Mrs. Rodgers wept hysterically on Albert’s shoulder.
    For Mrs. Rodgers had gloried vicariously in Agatha’s illness. It was of the right savoury type to appeal to her. It was something to talk about with pride to her friends, with much whisperings of gory and distorted detail; it was a disease from which only women could suffer, and hence a source of immense interest. ’Orsepitals and operations and cancer of the womb—why, they provided her with precedence in conversation for months afterwards. She had, naturally, full charge of the funeral arrangements subsequently too, and that was unmixed delight. There was a hundred pounds in Agatha’s account at the bank, so that Mrs. Rodgers had no need whatever to skimp or scrape about it. Agatha could have a funeral worthy of the lady she was. She could have the best oak coffin, and a first-class ’earse, and ’eaps and ’eaps of flowers—Mrs. Rodgers bought two or three wreaths out of Agatha’s money, because of course Agatha had not known enough people for their contributions to make a good enough show—and two coaches. Mrs. Rodgers was able to ask all her intimate cronies too, and indulge in all the orgy of ghoulish formality for which her soul craved. Albert had to have a black suit, and a black tie, and black gloves—Mrs. Rodgers would have insisted on a black shirt too if there had been any shadow of precedent for it—and travel in the first coach as chief mourner along with Mrs. Rodgers and Mr. Dickens, the vicar, and two of Mrs. Rodgers’s best friends. And there were mutes in plenty, in tall hats and frock-coats, walking with solemn, dignified sorrow beside the hearse. And when the business was over there was a real slap-up dinner at No. 37, with cold ’am and tongue and beef and tripe and port and sherry, with afterwards cup after cup of strong tea and delightful conversation around the fire with half a dozen women with their best party manners and black gowns. Quite one of the happiest and most satisfactory days in all Mrs. Rodgers’s life. Albert went through it all in a walking nightmare, and afterwards remembered hardly anything about it.

CHAPTER NINE
    T HERE IS LITTLE enough need to lay emphasis on the next section of Albert Brown’s career. Aged fourteen and a half, he could not join the Navy (as he knew already) until he was fifteen and a quarter. Mrs. Rodgers fussed over him until even he, insensitive though he was, could hardly bear the sight of her. He said goodbye to his school with hardly a twinge of regret; he had early been impregnated with Agatha’s fatalistic tendencies and he could, even at fourteen, accept the inevitable without complaint. Totally without introspection and without much notice for the circumstances in which he found himself, he was never more than vaguely unhappy during the following nine months.
    He had the sense to keep to himself his crystallized determination to join the Navy as soon as he was old enough—he never said very much at any time—and the school sympathetically found him an office boy’s position with a City firm. The only part of his life that he really hated was the bowler hat