to protect them from the contagion of death and all its malignancies.
Oh, Dad, let me be with you! the old stranger in the rear begged. For a few moments something in him strove desperately to be sitting up there at his accustomed place with his brothers and parents, beloved, guarded over and secure. In the end, repulsed and shaken by the impossible, he came back to his battered self.
The service was very long, the singing by the middle-aged choir quaint to his modern ears. Uncle Timothy and Uncle Peter’s preacher friend together with the local clergy had left to conduct the overflow services, one in the Sunday-school room, the other in the open air in front of the church, but there were plenty of clergymen left up here. Now, why did preachers look so grim and bloodless in their black dress, their faces fixed as the wooden tops of the tall pulpit chairs they sat on? Through the prayers and readings, each by a different speaker, and the funeral eulogies, all mixed with similar sounds from the other two services, John Donner escaped as when a boy through the open pane of the stained-glass window to the fresh greenery of a tree outside. The world out there was still young, the golden light about it very close to that which later shone in the face and voice of his father when he repeated certain passages with mystical fervor. “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling,” and “Grace be unto you and peace from Jesus Christ our Lord” and “To the only one God, our saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever, Amen.”
Sitting here among ecclesiastical shapes and symbols, with the strong stone walls of the church about him and therepetitions of faith in his ears, he marveled how pure that emotion from his father could reach him, letting him see how the church might appear not to himself but to the devout who attended year in and out, who here prayed their prayers and confessed their creed, whose families had belonged for generations, who were born, bred, baptized and raised in its shadow, who enjoyed the favor of its ministers and dignitaries, and to whom church, altar, pulpit, Bible, choir, sacraments, clergymen and synod were familiar furnishings of another, richer home, while the brother churches of its denomination were a chain of celestial forts here on earth, so that dying in the faith was almost as being borne into the nations of heaven.
The service ended and the congregations from the other two services began to file in a bottomless line up the aisle and by the altar to have a last look at the marble face of their old pastor. Those in the upper church were the last to join the queue, and in the end John Donner had to go along like the rest, past the bier and out the door, leaving the family and clergy alone with the body. He was hardly down the stairs when the first clang of the bell startled him, certainly no strange sound, for he had heard it often and never outgrown his fondness for its deep vibrations quivering on theair. Even on Sunday the slow turn of the immense wheel was evident. Whenever he had come back and heard it again so deliberate and timeless that for a moment after each turning one almost believed it had ceased ringing, he thought he knew why most Unionville men preferred not to leave home. But the sound today was something else, the stroke of a man with a hammer, a cruel, barbaric, almost brutal finality to life and hope that reached to his very bones.
There was such a swarm of people outside the church that he could scarcely make out his mother, just the crown of a woman’s hat as she came down with the family before getting into one of the carriages. As a rule the people started off at once on foot for the cemetery. The services at the grave those days were the crowning act of a man’s life, like the other Elijah going in a chariot to heaven or the town drunkard let down on ropes to eternal hell. But today the crowd remained filling street and sidewalks.
Oh, Dad, let me be with you! the old stranger in the rear begged. For a few moments something in him strove desperately to be sitting up there at his accustomed place with his brothers and parents, beloved, guarded over and secure. In the end, repulsed and shaken by the impossible, he came back to his battered self.
The service was very long, the singing by the middle-aged choir quaint to his modern ears. Uncle Timothy and Uncle Peter’s preacher friend together with the local clergy had left to conduct the overflow services, one in the Sunday-school room, the other in the open air in front of the church, but there were plenty of clergymen left up here. Now, why did preachers look so grim and bloodless in their black dress, their faces fixed as the wooden tops of the tall pulpit chairs they sat on? Through the prayers and readings, each by a different speaker, and the funeral eulogies, all mixed with similar sounds from the other two services, John Donner escaped as when a boy through the open pane of the stained-glass window to the fresh greenery of a tree outside. The world out there was still young, the golden light about it very close to that which later shone in the face and voice of his father when he repeated certain passages with mystical fervor. “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling,” and “Grace be unto you and peace from Jesus Christ our Lord” and “To the only one God, our saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever, Amen.”
Sitting here among ecclesiastical shapes and symbols, with the strong stone walls of the church about him and therepetitions of faith in his ears, he marveled how pure that emotion from his father could reach him, letting him see how the church might appear not to himself but to the devout who attended year in and out, who here prayed their prayers and confessed their creed, whose families had belonged for generations, who were born, bred, baptized and raised in its shadow, who enjoyed the favor of its ministers and dignitaries, and to whom church, altar, pulpit, Bible, choir, sacraments, clergymen and synod were familiar furnishings of another, richer home, while the brother churches of its denomination were a chain of celestial forts here on earth, so that dying in the faith was almost as being borne into the nations of heaven.
The service ended and the congregations from the other two services began to file in a bottomless line up the aisle and by the altar to have a last look at the marble face of their old pastor. Those in the upper church were the last to join the queue, and in the end John Donner had to go along like the rest, past the bier and out the door, leaving the family and clergy alone with the body. He was hardly down the stairs when the first clang of the bell startled him, certainly no strange sound, for he had heard it often and never outgrown his fondness for its deep vibrations quivering on theair. Even on Sunday the slow turn of the immense wheel was evident. Whenever he had come back and heard it again so deliberate and timeless that for a moment after each turning one almost believed it had ceased ringing, he thought he knew why most Unionville men preferred not to leave home. But the sound today was something else, the stroke of a man with a hammer, a cruel, barbaric, almost brutal finality to life and hope that reached to his very bones.
There was such a swarm of people outside the church that he could scarcely make out his mother, just the crown of a woman’s hat as she came down with the family before getting into one of the carriages. As a rule the people started off at once on foot for the cemetery. The services at the grave those days were the crowning act of a man’s life, like the other Elijah going in a chariot to heaven or the town drunkard let down on ropes to eternal hell. But today the crowd remained filling street and sidewalks.
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