WHERE THEY SING FROM MORNING TILL NIGHT
I awoke to the same silvery salutation, and the sound of country boots
echoing across farm-yard cobble-stones. A lantern flashing in and out
among barns lit up my ceiling for a moment, a rough country voice hailed
another rough country voice somewhere outside, and the day slowly coughed
and sneezed itself awake in the six-o'clock grayness. I heard Colin
moving in the next room, and presently we were down-stairs, alertly
hungry. Our hostess, with morning smile, asked if we would mind waiting
breakfast for "the boarders." Meanwhile, we stepped out into the
unfolding day, and the village that had been a mystery to us in the
darkness was revealed; a handful of farmhouses on the brow of a
solitary-looking upland, and, looming over all, a great cathedral-like
church that seemed to have been transported bodily from France. Stepping
out to say good-morning to some young pigs that were sociably grunting in
a neighbouring sty, we beheld the vast landscape of our preceding day
stretched out beneath us, mistily emerging into the widening sunrise.
With pride our eyes traced the steep white road we had so arduously
travelled, and, for remembrance, Colin made a swift sketch of Dutch
Hollow huddled down there in the valley, with its white church steeple
catching the morning sun. And, by this, "the boarders" had assembled, and
we found ourselves at breakfast in a cheery company of three workmen, who
were as bright and full of fun as boys out for a holiday. They were
presently joined by a fourth, a hearty, middle-aged man, who, as he sat
down, greeted us with:
"I feel just like singing this morning."
"Good for you!" said one of us. "That's the way to begin the day." His
good nature was magnetic.
"Yes," he laughed, "we sing in Sheldon from morning till night."
"Sheldon's evidently a good place to know," I said. "I will make a note
of that for New Yorkers."
So, reader, sometimes when the world seems all wrong, and life a very
doubtful speculation, you may care to know of a place where the days go
so blithely that men actually sing from morning till night! Sheldon
Center is that place. You can find it on any map, and I can testify that
the news is true.
And the men that thus sang from morning till night--what was the trade
they worked and sang at?
We gathered from a few dropped words that they were engaged on some work
over at the church--masonry, no doubt--and, as they left the
breakfast-table, in a laughing knot, to begin the day's work, they
suggested our giving a look in at them on our way. This we promised to
do, for a merrier, better-hearted lot of fellows it would be hard to
find. To meet them was to feel a warm glow of human comradeship. Healthy,
normal, happy fellows, enjoying their work as men should, and taking life
as it came with sane, unconscious gusto; it was a tonic encounter to be
in their company.
They were grave-diggers, engaged in renovating the village churchyard!
Yes! and, said our hostess, they were making it like a garden! It had
been long neglected and become disgracefully overgrown with weeds and
bushes, but now they were trimming it up in fine style. They were
cemetery experts from Batavia way, and the job was to cost sixteen
hundred dollars. But it was worth it, for indeed they were making it look
like a garden!
Presently we stepped over to the churchyard. We should not have been
human if we had not advanced with a Hamlet-Horatio air: "Has this fellow
no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?" We found our
four friends in a space of the churchyard from which the tombstones had
been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but
with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of
newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the
portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span
headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly scraped--not a
sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen. A neat job, if
there ever was one. We should have seen the yard before they had taken it
in hand! There wasn't a stone that was straight, and the weeds and the
brambles--well, look at it now. We looked. Could anything be more refined
or in more perfect taste? The churchyard was as smooth and correct as a
newly-barbered head, not a hair out of place. We looked and kept our
thoughts to ourselves, but we wondered if the dead were really as
grateful as they should be for this drastic house-cleaning? Did they
appreciate this mathematical uniformity, this spruce and spotless
residential air of their numbered rectangular rest; or was not the old
way nearer to their desire, with soft mosses tucking them in from the
garish sun, and Spring winds spreading coverlets of wild flowers above
their sleep?
But--who knows?--perhaps the dead prefer to be up-to-date, and to follow
the fashion in funeral furnishings; and surely such expert necropolitans
as our four friends ought to know. No doubt the Sheldon Center dead would
have the same tastes as the Sheldon Center living; for, after all, we
forget, in our idealization of them, that the dead, like the living, are
a vast _bourgeoisie_. Yes! it is a depressing thought--the _bourgeoisie_
of the dead!
As we stood talking, the young priest of the parish joined our group. He
was a German, from Düsseldorf, and his worn face lit up when he found
that Colin had been at Düsseldorf and could talk with him about it. As
he stood with us there on that bleak upland, he seemed a pathetic,
symbolic figure, lonely standard-bearer of the spirit in one of the
dreary colonies of that indomitable church that carries her mystic
sacraments even into the waste places and borders of the world. The
romance of Rome was far away beyond that horizon on which he turned his
wistful look; here was its hard work, its daily prose. But he turned
proudly to the great pile that loomed over us. We had commented on its
size in so remote a parish.
"Yes, I am proud of our people," he said. "It is greatly to their
credit." One could not help silently wondering that the spiritual needs
of this handful of lonely houses should demand so ambitious a structure.
But the symbols of the soul can never be too impressive. Then we said
good-bye to our friends, and struck out into the morning sunshine,
leaving the village of song behind.
Yes! in Sheldon Center they sing from morning till night--at
grave-making!