There were in particular women the names and countenances and family history of whom were familiar to hundreds of thousands of illustrated-newspaper readers, even in the most distant counties, and who never missed what was called a “function,” whether “brilliant,” “exclusive,” or merely scandalous.  At murder trials, at the sales of art collections, at the birth of musical comedies, at boxing matches, at historic debates, at receptions in honour of the renowned, at luscious divorce cases, they were surely present, and the entire Press surely noted that they were present.  And if executions had been public, they would in the same religious spirit have attended executions, rousing their maids at milkmen’s hours in order that they might assume the right cunning frock to fit the occasion.  And they were here.  And no one could divine why or how, or to what eternal end.

G.J. hated them, and he hated the solemn self-satisfaction that brooded over the haughty faces of the throng.  He hated himself for having accepted a ticket from the friend in the War Office who was now sitting next to him.  And yet he was pleased, too.  A disturbed conscience could not defeat the instinct which bound him to the whole fashionable and powerful assemblage.  For ever afterwards, to his dying hour, he could say—­casually, modestly, as a matter of course, but he could still say—­that he had been there.  The Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, tradesmen glittering like Oriental potentates, passed slowly across his field of vision.  He thought with contempt of the City, living ghoulish on the buried past, and obstinately and humanly refusing to make a pile of its putrefying interests, set fire to it, and perish thereon.

The music began.  It was the Dead March in Saul.  The long-rolling drums suddenly rent the soul, and destroyed every base and petty thought that was there.  Clergy, headed by a bishop, were walking down the cathedral.  At the huge doors, nearly lost in the heavy twilight of November noon, they stopped, turned and came back.  The coffin swayed into view, covered with the sacred symbolic bunting, and borne on the shoulders of eight sergeants of the old regiments of the dead man.  Then followed the pall-bearers—­five field-marshals, five full generals, and two admirals; aged men, and some of them had reached the highest dignity without giving a single gesture that had impressed itself on the national mind; nonentities, apotheosised by seniority; and some showed traces of the bitter rain that was falling in the fog outside.  Then the Primate.  Then the King, who had supervened from nowhere, the magic production of chamberlains and comptrollers.  The procession, headed by the clergy, moved slowly, amid the vistas ending in the dull burning of stained glass, through the congregation in mourning and in khaki, through the lines of yellow-glowing candelabra, towards the crowd of scarlet under the dome; the summit of the dome was hidden in soft mist.  The music became insupportable in its sublimity.