There was a funeral. Chaplin did not organize it, and protested that he could not go to such a thing. All ceremony struck him as repressive, and funerals were awful, and a funeral for a baby was bound to be sentimental folly. But on the morning of the event, he could not find a reason to stay home, and so he dressed as Mildred found her way into a black dress and veil as slowly as if she were drugged. Beside her bed there was a small cage, and in the cage was a wheel, and the wheel spun freely as the tiny gray, pink-nosed mouse Hannah had given Mildred galloped, and then fell asleep in his wood shavings.

Chaplin saw her watching the mouse while she put on a pair of clip earrings. This marriage would not last. Nor would his next. Nor his next. The fourth one would. Chaplin saw himself in the mirror, as he shot his cuffs and threaded his onyx cuff links through his French-made shirt. He carried with him as if it were a snapshot the image of his dead baby’s eyes, blank blue saucers, little windows into the human world. And the message he could read, when he looked carefully into them, was that life was meaningless.

He was finished with pictures. He had made sixty-six movies in five years. Sunnyside—finished—was not as good as he was. The Little Fellow romanced Edna without effort. He dreamed of dancing with nymphs. A city slicker almost swept Edna away. The Little Fellow crouched in front of a speeding car to kill himself—and woke up! It had been another dream. Even the scene cards (“And now the ‘romance.’”) seemed bored. It made no real sense, and it was a failure, his first. No one asked to hold it over a week. The prints returned in excellent condition. Whispers began about him, that he had lost his abilities and was just going through the motions now. No one had understood Sunnyside, and he had to give his audience credit: there was nothing to understand.

And then he was at the funeral. There was Mildred, head bowed, eyes closed and leaking tears, and one of her hands closed around his, pressing her wet handkerchief into his palm. And Syd and Minnie, and Mildred’s mother, and Doug and Mary. He stared out the window into the cemetery. He saw a canary on a gravestone, next to a broken sundial.