Читать книгу Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York - Frederic Harold - Страница 10

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The American farm-house funeral is surely, of all the observances with which civilized man marks the ending of this earthly pilgrimage, the most pathetic. The rural life itself is a sad and sterile enough thing, with its unrelieved physical strain, its enervating and destructive diet, its mental barrenness, its sternly narrowed groove of toil and thought and companionship—but death on the farm brings a desolating gloom, a cruel sense of the hopelessness of existence, which one realizes nowhere else. The grim, fatalist habit of seizing upon the grotesque side, which a century of farm life has crystallized into what the world knows as American humor, is not wanting even in this hour; and the comforting conviction of immortality, of the shining reward to follow travail and sorrow, is nowhere more firmly insisted upon than among our country people. But the bleak environment of the closed life, the absence of real fellowship among the living, the melancholy isolation and vanity of it all, oppress the soul here with an intolerable weight which neither fund of sardonic spirits nor honest faith can lighten.

Something of this Isabel felt, as the mid-day meal was hurried through, on Alvira’s sharp intimation that the room couldn’t be cleared any too soon, for the crowd would begin coming now, right along. There were three strangers at the table—though they seemed to be scarcely more strangers than the members of her husband’s family—of whom two were clergymen.

One of these, who sat next to her, was the Episcopalian minister at Thessaly, a middle-aged, soft sort of man, with short hair so smooth and furry that she was conscious of an impulse to stroke it like a seal-skin, and little side-whiskers which reminded her of a baby brush. He impressed her as a stupid man, but in that she was mistaken. He was nervous and ill at ease, first because he could not successfully or gracefully use the narrow three-tined steel fork with a bone handle that had been given him, and second, because he did not understand the presence of the Rev. Stephen Bunce, who sat opposite him, offensively smacking his lips, and devoting to loud discourse periods which it seemed might better have been employed in mastication.

If quiet Mr. Turner was ill at ease, the Rev. Stephen was certainly not. He bestrode the situation like a modern Colossus. The shape of his fork did not worry him, since he used it only as a humble and lowly adjunct to his knife. The presence of Mr. Turner too, neither puzzled nor pained him. In fact, he was rather pleased than otherwise to have him there, where he could talk to him before sympathetic witnesses, and make him realise how the man of the people who had a genuine call towered innately superior to mere beneficed gentility. “Beneficed gentility”—that was a good phrase, and he made a mental note of it for future use; then—the temptation was too strong—he bundled it neck and crop into the florid sentence with which he was addressing Albert—and looked at the Episcopalian to watch its effect.

Mr. Turner was occupied with his javelin-shaped fork, and did not seem to hear it.

Mr. Bunce suspected artifice in this, and watched the rector’s meek face for a sign of secret confusion. After a moment he said, with his full, pompous voice at its loudest and most artificial pitch:—

“Ah, Mr. Turner, this is a sad occasion!”

The rector glanced up with some surprise, for he had not expected this overture, and answered “Yes, truly it is; extremely sad.”

“Yet it is consoling to feel that even so sad an occasion can be converted into a means of grace, a season of spiritual solace as it were.”

Mr. Turner only nodded assent to this; he felt that the whole company around the table, hired people and all, were eagerly watching him and the burly, bold-faced preacher opposite, as if they were about to engage in gladiatorial combat.

But Mr. Bunce would not permit the challenge to be declined. He stroked his ochre-hued chin whisker, looked complacently around the board, and asked:

“I s’pose you’ve brought your white and black riggins’ along, eh? Or don’t you wear ’em except in Church?”

There was a pained look in Mr. Turner’s face; he made a little gesture toward the folding doors leading to the parlor, beyond which lay the dead, and murmured:

“It will be better, will it not, to speak of these matters together, after dinner?”

Again the Rev. Stephen glanced around the table, looking especially toward Miss Sabrina for approval, and remarked loftily:

“There is no need of concealment here, sir. It is all in the family here. We all know that the Mother in Israel who has departed was formerly of your communion, and if she wanted to have you here, sir, at her funeral, why well and good. But the rest of this sorrowin’ family, sir, this stricken household, air Baptists—”

“I declare! there’s the Burrells drivin’ into the yard, a’ready!” said Alvira, rising from her chair abruptly. “If you’re threw we better hustle these things aout, naow; you women won’t more’n have time to dress ’fore they’ll all be here.”

The interruption seemed a welcome one to everybody, for there was a general movement on both sides of Mr. Bunce, which he, with his sentence unfinished, was constrained to join.

The third stranger, a small, elderly man with a mobile countenance and rusty black clothes, drew himself up, put on a modifiedly doleful expression, and, speaking for the first time, assumed control of everything:

“Naow, Milton, you ’n’ Leander git the table aout, ’n’ bring in all the extry chairs, ’n’ set ’em ’raound in rows. Squeeze ’em pooty well together in back, but the front ones kind o’ spread aout. You, Miss Sabriny, ’n’ the lady”—indicating Isabel with his thumb—“ ’n’ Annie’d better go upstairs ’n’ git yer bonnets on, ’n’ things, ’n’ go ’n’ set in the room at the head o’ the stairs. You men, tew, git your gloves on, ’n’ naow be sure ’n’ have your hankch’fs in some pocket where you can git at ’em with your gloves on—‘n’ have your hats in your hands, ‘n’ then go ’n’ set with the ladies. Miss Sabriny, you’ll come daown arm-in-arm with yer brother, when I call, ’n’ then Albert ’n’ his wife, ’n’ John with Annie, ’n’ Seth with—pshaw, there’s odd numbers. Well, Seth can come alone. And dew keep step comin’ daown stairs!”

“ ’N’ naow, gents,” turning to the Rev. Mr. Turner, “your gaown’s in the fust room to the right on the landin’, and if you”—addressing Mr. Bunce—“will go up with him, and arrange ’baout the services, so’s to come daown together—it’ll look pootier than to straggle in by yourselves—‘n’ you, Milton, ain’t you got somethin’ besides overalls to put on?”

Thus the autocrat cleared the living room. Then, going around through the front hall, he entered the parlor to receive, with solemn dignity and a fine eye to their relative social merit, the first comers.

These were almost exclusively women, dressed in Sunday garb. As each buggy or democrat wagon drove up inside the gate, and discharged its burden, the men would lead the horses further on, to be hitched under or near the shed, and then saunter around to the kitchen side of the house, where cider was on tap, and other men were standing in the sunshine, chewing tobacco and conversing in low tones, while the women from each conveyance went straight to the front door, and got seats in the parlor as close to the coffin as possible. The separation of the sexes could hardly have been more rigorous in a synagogue. There were, indeed two or three meek, well-brushed men among the women, sitting, uncomfortable but resigned, in the geranium-scented gloom of the curtained parlor, but, as the more virile brethren outside would have said, they were men who didn’t count.

The task of the undertaker was neither light nor altogether smooth. There were some dozen chairs reserved, nearest the pall, for the mourners, the clergymen and the mixed quartette expected from Thessaly. Every woman on entering made for these chairs, and the more unimportant and “low-down” she was in the rural scale of social values, the more confidently she essayed to get one of them. With all of these more or less argument was necessary—conducted in a buzzing whisper from which some squeak or guttural exclamation would now and again emerge. With some, the undertaker was compelled to be quite peremptory; while one woman—Susan Jane Squires, a slatternly, weak-eyed creature who presumed upon her position as sister-in-law of Milton, the hired man—had actually to be pushed away by sheer force.

Then there was the further labor of inducing all these disappointed ones to take the seats furthest back, so that late comers might not have to push by and over them, but efforts in this direction were only fitful at the best, and soon were practically abandoned.

“Fust come, fust sarved!” said old Mrs. Wimple. “I’m jes ez good ez them that’ll come bimeby, ’n’ ef I don’ mind their climbin’ over me, you needn’t!” and against this the undertaker could urge nothing satisfactory.

In the intervals of that functionary’s activity, conversation was quite general, carried on in whispers which, in the aggregate, sounded like the rustle of a smart breeze through the dry leaves of a beach tree. Many women were there who had never been in the house before—could indeed, have had no other chance of getting in. These had some fleeting interest in the funeral appointments, and the expense incident thereto, but their chief concern was the furnishing of the house. They furtively scraped the carpet with their feet to test its quality, they felt of the furniture to see if it had been re-varnished, they estimated the value of the curtains, speculated on the cost of the melodeon and its age, wondered when the ceiling had last been whitewashed. Some, who knew the family better, discussed the lamentable decline of the Fairchilds in substance and standing within their recollection, and exchanged hints about the endemic mortgage stretching its sinister hand even to the very chairs they were sitting on. Others, still more intimate, rehearsed the details of the last and fatal illness, commented on the character of individuals in the family, and guessed how long old Lemuel would last, now that Cicely was gone.

In the centre of these circling waves of gossip lay the embodiment of the eternal silence. Listening, one might fain envy such an end to that living death of mental starvation which was the lot of all there, and which forced them, out of their womanhood, to chatter in the presence of death.

The singers came. They were from the village, belonging to the Congregational church there, and it was understood that they came out of liking for John Fairchild. None of the gathering knew them personally, but it was said that the contralto—the woman with the bird on her bonnet, who took her seat at the melodeon—had had trouble with her husband. A fresh buzz of whispering ran round. Some stray word must have reached the contralto, for she colored and pretended to study the music before her intently, and, later, when “Pleyel’s Hymn” was being sung, she played so nervously that there was an utter collapse in the sharps and flats of the third line, which nearly threw the singers out.

The undertaker now stalked in, and stood on tiptoe to see if the back room was also filled. He had been out with the men at the kitchen door, fixing crape on the arms of six of the best dressed and most respectable looking farmers in an almost jocular mood, and drilling them affably in their duties; drinking cider, exchanging gossip with one or two acquaintances, and conducting himself generally like an ordinary mortal. He had now resumed his dictatorship.

Most of the men had followed him around to the front of the house, and clustered now in the hall, or in a group about the outer door, holding their hats on a level with their shoulders.

A rustle on the stairs told that the mourners were descending. Then came the strains of the melodeon, and the singing, very low, solemn and sweet.

A little pause, and the full voice of the Baptist preacher was heard in prayer—then in some eulogistic remarks. What he said was largely nonsense, from any point of view, but the voice was that of the born exhorter, deep, clear-toned, melodious; there seemed to be a stop in it, as in an organ, which at pathetic parts gave forth a tremulous, weeping sound, and when this came not a dry eye could be found. He was over-fond of using this effect, as are most men possessing the trick, but no one noticed it, not even Isabel, who from sitting sternly intolerant of the whispering women around her, and indignant at Mr. Bunce for his dinner performance, found herself sobbing with all the rest when the tremulo stop was touched.

There was more singing, this time fine, simple old “St. Denis” and then the bearers were summoned in.

The men asked one another in murmurs outside if the Episcopal clargyman was to take no part in the services. Within, Mrs. Wimple went straighter to the point. She plucked him by the sleeve of his robe and leaning over with some difficulty, for she was a corpulent body, whispered to the hearing of a score of her neighbours:

“What air you here fer, mister, if you ain’t goin’ to say nor dew nothin’?”

“I officiate at the grave,” he had said, and then regretted all the remainder of the day having answered her at all.

On the return of the procession from the little knoll where the slate and marble tomb-stones of long dead Fairchilds bent over the new brown mound, Annie and Seth walked together. There was silence between them for a time, which he broke suddenly.

“It’s all very hard, Annie, for you know how much mother and I loved each other. But, truly, the hardest thing of all is to think of staying here among these narrow dolts. While she was here I could stand it. But I can’t any more.”

Annie said nothing. She felt his arm trembling against hers, and his voice was strained and excited. What could she say?

“They’re not like me,” he went on; “I have nothing in common with them. I hate the sight of the whole of them. I never realised till to-day how big a gulf there was between them and me. Didn’t you see it—what a mean, narrow-contracted lot they all were?”

“Who do you mean, Seth?”

“Why all of them. The Burrells, the Wimples, old Elhanan Pratt, old Lyman Tenney, that fellow Bunce—the whole lot of them. And the women too! Did you watch them—or, what’s worse, did you hear them? I wonder you can bear them yourself, Annie, any more than I can.”

“Sometimes it is hard, Seth, I admit; when I first came back to grandma from school it was awfully hard. But then I’ve got to live here, and reconcile myself to what the place offers—and, after all, Seth, they are well-meaning people, and some of them are smart, too, in their way.”

“Oh, well-meaning—in their way—yes! But I haven’t got to live here, Annie, and I haven’t got to reconcile myself, and I won’t That’s the long and short of it. I can make my living elsewhere—perhaps more than my living—and be among people who don’t make me angry every time I set eyes on them. And I can find friends, too, who feel as I do, and look at things as I do, instead of these country louts who only know abominable stories, and these foolish girls—who—who—”

“Nobody can blame you to-day, Seth, for feeling blue and sore, but you ought not to talk so, even now. They’re not all like what you say. Reuben Tracy, now, he’s been a good friend and a useful friend to you.”

“Yes, Rube’s a grand, good fellow, of course. I know all that. But then just take his case. He’s a poor schoolmaster now, just as he was five years ago, and will be twenty years from now. What kind of a life is that for a man?”

“And maybe the girls are—foolish, as you started to say, but—”

“Now, Annie, don’t think I m’eant anything by that, please! I know you’re the dearest girl and the best friend in the world. Truly, now, you won’t think I meant anything, will you?”

“No, Seth, I won’t” said Annie softly. It was her arm that trembled now.