_In a Country Churchyard, and afterwards; of Friends: how they take
your Time while they live, and then die, upsetting your Evening's
Work; and what Buck Klinker saw in the Scriptorium at 2 a.m._
Queed was caught, like many another rationalist before him, by the
stirring beauty of the burial service of the English church.
Fifi's funeral was in the country, at a little church set down in a
beautiful grove which reminds all visitors of the saying about God's
first temples. Near here Mrs. Paynter was born and spent her girlhood;
here Fifi, before her last illness, had come every Sabbath morning to
the Sunday-school; here lay the little strip of God's acre that the now
childless widow called her own. You come by the new electric line, one
of those high-speed suburban roads which, all over the country, are
doing so much to persuade city people back to the land. The cars are
steam-road size. Two of them had been provided for the mourners, and
there was no room to spare; for the Paynter family connection was large,
and it seemed that little Fifi had many friends.
From Stop 11, where the little station is, your course is by the
woodland path; past the little springhouse, over the tiny rustic bridge,
and so on up the shady slope to the cluster of ancient pines. In the
grove stood carriages; buggy horses reined to the tall trees; even that
abomination around a church, the motor of the vandals. In the walk
through the woods, Queed found himself side by side with a fat,
scarlet-faced man, who wore a vest with brass buttons and immediately
began talking to him like a lifelong friend. He was a motorman on the
suburban line, it seemed, and had known Fifi very well.
"No, sir, I wouldn't believe it when my wife seen it in the paper and
called it out to me, an' I says there's some mistake, you can be sure,
and she says no, here it is in the paper, you can read it for y'self.
But I wouldn't believe it till I went by the house on the way to my run,
and there was the crape on the door. An' I tell you, suh, I couldn't a
felt worse if 'twas one o' my own kids. Why, it seems like only the
other morning she skipped onto my car, laughin' and sayin', 'How are you
to-day, Mr. Barnes?' Why she and me been buddies for nigh three years,
and she took my 9.30 north car every Sunday morning, rain or shine, just
as reg'lar, and was the only one I ever let stand out on _my_ platform,
bein' strictly agin all rules, and my old partner Hornheim was fired for
allowin' it, it ain't six months since. But what could I do when she
asked me, _please, Mr. Barnes_, with that sweet face o' hers, and her
rememberin' me every Christmas that came along just like I was her
Pa...."
The motorman talked too much, but he proved useful in finding seats up
near the front, where, being fat, he took up considerably more than his
share of room.
Unless Tim had taken him to the Cathedral once, twenty years ago, it was
the first time that Queed had ever been inside a church. He had read
Renan at fourteen, finally discarding all religious beliefs in the same
year. Approximately Spencer's First Cause satisfied his reason, though
he meant to buttress Spencer's contention in its weakest place and carry
it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should
assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still
indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found
this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here
in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the
supreme religious belief. There was some compensation for his enforced
attendance in that thought. He looked about him with genuine and candid
interest. The hush, the dim light, the rows upon rows of sober-faced
people, seemed to him properly impressive. He was struck by the wealth
of flowers massed all over the chancel, and wondered if that was its
regular state. The pulpit and the lectern; the altar, which he easily
identified; the stained-glass windows with their obviously symbolic
pictures; the bronze pipes of the little organ; the unvested choir,
whose function he vaguely made out--over all these his intelligent eye
swept, curiously; and lastly it went out of the open window and lost
itself in the quiet sunny woods outside.
Strange and full of wonder. This incredible instinct for adoration--this
invincible insistence in believing, in defiance of all reason, that man
was not born to die as the flesh dies. What, after all, was the full
significance of this unique phenomenon?
_I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live...._
A loud resonant voice suddenly cut the hush with these words and
immediately they were all standing. Queed was among the first to rise;
the movement was like a reflex action. For there was something in the
thrilling timbre of that voice that seemed to pull him to his feet
regardless of his will; something, in fact, that impelled him to crane
his neck around and peer down the dim aisle to discover immediately who
was the author of it.
His eye fell on a young man advancing, clad in white robes the like of
which he had never seen, and wearing the look of the morning upon his
face. In his hands he bore an open book, but he did not glance at it.
His head was thrown back; his eyes seemed fastened on something outside
and beyond the church; and he rolled out the victorious words as though
he would stake all that he held dearest in this world that their
prophecy was true.
_Whom I shall see for myself, and_ MINE _eyes shall behold, and not
another...._
But behind the young man rolled a little stand on wheels, on which lay a
long box banked in flowers; and though the little Doctor had never been
at a funeral before, and never in the presence of death, he knew that
here must lie the mortal remains of his little friend, Fifi. From this
point onward Queed's interest in the service became, so to say, less
purely scientific.
There was some antiphonal reciting, and then a long selection which the
young man in robes read with the same voice of solemn triumph. It is
doubtful if anybody in the church followed him with the fascinated
attention of the young evolutionist. Soon the organ rumbled, and the
little choir, standing, broke into song.
For all the Saints who from their labors rest....
Saints! Well, well, was it imaginable that they thought of Fifi that way
_already_? Why, it was only three weeks ago that he had sent her the
roses and she....
A black-gloved hand, holding an open book, descended out of the dim
space behind him. It came to him, as by an inspiration, that the book
was being offered for his use in some mysterious connection. He grasped
it gingerly, and his friend the motorman, jabbing at the text with a
scarlet hand, whispered raucously: "'S what they're singin'." But the
singers had traveled far before the young man was able to find and
follow them.
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.