Gilchrist had been a man alive, one of those whose names were known to the world. The name Gilchrist had meant a large building stored with rugs, period furniture, innumerable clerks, departments, delivery trucks, advertisements in newspapers and on fences. The man Gilchrist had been one with whom the dignitaries of the city had shared the intimacy of prestige.
They had said Gilchrist's was a fine store, Gilchrist's was marvelous furniture, Gilchrist was a highly successful business man. Gilchrist was this and that and the other. And here lay Gilchrist, waxen and unscrupulously silent, under a glass cover--a little man with pale sideburns that were now doubly useless, in a black suit and his hands folded over his chest. Here lay Gilchrist dead, and yet the things that had been called Gilchrist still lived. As if immortality was an artifice, superior to life. The furniture store, the furniture, the clerks, trucks, advertisements, the highly successful business--all these still lived. And this was an uncomfortable fact. It embarrassed the mourners. They drifted about with uncertainty.
Like Gilchrist they were men and women whose names were synonymous with great activities. Like Gilchrist, they were considered as the inspiration of these activities. In fact the activities were an artificial symbol of themselves--a sort of photograph of themselves. Yet like Gilchrist, all of them would lie under a glass cover some day and nothing would be changed. The activities that everybody called by their names would still live. As if they had had nothing to do with them. As if these symbols were the life of the city and not the men and women whom they symbolized. Yes, as if these activities which represented their prestige were independent individualities--masks which loaned themselves for a few years to them to wear. And which they took off when they lay stretched under a glass cover. Which they would take off and become anonymous.
For who was this waxen-faced man in the coffin? Nobody knew. They had called him Gilchrist. But Gilchrist was clerks, advertisements, furniture, and business. This man in the coffin was someone else, an irritating impostor that reminded them they were all impostors. Death was a confession everyone must make; an incongruous confession. An ending to something that had no ending. Life and its activities, even the activities that bore the name Gilchrist, went on. Yet Gilchrist had, mysteriously, come to an end. He lay in a coffin while his name in large letters talked to other names in the advertisements of the city.