ONE DAY I reached the schoolhouse very late, owing to attendance upon
the funeral of an acquaintance and neighbor, with whose sad decline in
health I had been familiar, and whose last days both the doctor and
Mrs. Todd had tried in vain to ease. The services had taken place at
one o'clock, and now, at quarter past two, I stood at the schoolhouse
window, looking down at the procession as it went along the lower road
close to the shore. It was a walking funeral, and even at that distance
I could recognize most of the mourners as they went their solemn way.
Mrs. Begg had been very much respected, and there was a large company
of friends following to her grave. She had been brought up on one of
the neighboring farms, and each of the few times that I had seen her
she professed great dissatisfaction with town life. The people lived
too close together for her liking, at the Landing, and she could not
get used to the constant sound of the sea. She had lived to lament
three seafaring husbands, and her house was decorated with West Indian
curiosities, specimens of conch shells and fine coral which they had
brought home from their voyages in lumber-laden ships. Mrs. Todd had
told me all our neighbor's history. They had been girls together, and,
to use her own phrase, had “both seen trouble till they knew the best
and worst on 't.” I could see the sorrowful, large figure of Mrs. Todd
as I stood at the window. She made a break in the procession by walking
slowly and keeping the after-part of it back. She held a handkerchief
to her eyes, and I knew, with a pang of sympathy, that hers was not
affected grief.
Beside her, after much difficulty, I recognized the one strange and
unrelated person in all the company, an old man who had always been
mysterious to me. I could see his thin, bending figure. He wore a
narrow, long-tailed coat and walked with a stick, and had the same “cant
to leeward” as the wind-bent trees on the height above.
This was Captain Littlepage, whom I had seen only once or twice before,
sitting pale and old behind a closed window; never out of doors until
now. Mrs. Todd always shook her head gravely when I asked a question,
and said that he wasn't what he had been once, and seemed to class him
with her other secrets. He might have belonged with a simple which grew
in a certain slug-haunted corner of the garden, whose use she could
never be betrayed into telling me, though I saw her cutting the tops
by moonlight once, as if it were a charm, and not a medicine, like the
great fading bloodroot leaves.
I could see that she was trying to keep pace with the old captain's
lighter steps. He looked like an aged grasshopper of some strange human
variety. Behind this pair was a short, impatient, little person, who
kept the captain's house, and gave it what Mrs. Todd and others believed
to be no proper sort of care. She was usually called “that Mari' Harris”
in subdued conversation between intimates, but they treated her with
anxious civility when they met her face to face.
The bay-sheltered islands and the great sea beyond stretched away to
the far horizon southward and eastward; the little procession in the
foreground looked futile and helpless on the edge of the rocky shore. It
was a glorious day early in July, with a clear, high sky; there were no
clouds, there was no noise of the sea. The song sparrows sang and sang,
as if with joyous knowledge of immortality, and contempt for those who
could so pettily concern themselves with death. I stood watching until
the funeral procession had crept round a shoulder of the slope below and
disappeared from the great landscape as if it had gone into a cave.
An hour later I was busy at my work. Now and then a bee blundered in and
took me for an enemy; but there was a useful stick upon the teacher's
desk, and I rapped to call the bees to order as if they were unruly
scholars, or waved them away from their riots over the ink, which I had
bought at the Landing store, and discovered to be scented with bergamot,
as if to refresh the labors of anxious scribes. One anxious scribe
felt very dull that day; a sheep-bell tinkled near by, and called her
wandering wits after it. The sentences failed to catch these lovely
summer cadences. For the first time I began to wish for a companion
and for news from the outer world, which had been, half unconsciously,
forgotten. Watching the funeral gave one a sort of pain. I began to
wonder if I ought not to have walked with the rest, instead of hurrying
away at the end of the services. Perhaps the Sunday gown I had put on
for the occasion was making this disastrous change of feeling, but I had
now made myself and my friends remember that I did not really belong to
Dunnet Landing.