CHAPTER VII
THE CEMETERY
The air as of an ice-house met me crossing the threshold. The
door fell-to behind us. The sexton said something to his wife
that made her turn toward us.--What a change had passed upon her!
It was as if the splendour of her eyes had grown too much for them
to hold, and, sinking into her countenance, made it flash with a
loveliness like that of Beatrice in the white rose of the redeemed.
Life itself, life eternal, immortal, streamed from it, an unbroken
lightning. Even her hands shone with a white radiance, every
"pearl-shell helmet" gleaming like a moonstone. Her beauty was
overpowering; I was glad when she turned it from me.
But the light of the candle reached such a little way, that at first
I could see nothing of the place. Presently, however, it fell on
something that glimmered, a little raised from the floor. Was it
a bed? Could live thing sleep in such a mortal cold? Then surely
it was no wonder it should not wake of itself! Beyond that appeared
a fainter shine; and then I thought I descried uncertain gleams on
every side.
A few paces brought us to the first; it was a human form under a
sheet, straight and still--whether of man or woman I could not tell,
for the light seemed to avoid the face as we passed.
I soon perceived that we were walking along an aisle of couches,
on almost every one of which, with its head to the passage, lay
something asleep or dead, covered with a sheet white as snow. My
soul grew silent with dread. Through aisle after aisle we went,
among couches innumerable. I could see only a few of them at
once, but they were on all sides, vanishing, as it seemed, in the
infinite.--Was it here lay my choice of a bed? Must I go to sleep
among the unwaking, with no one to rouse me? Was this the sexton's
library? were these his books? Truly it was no half-way house, this
chamber of the dead!
"One of the cellars I am placed to watch!" remarked Mr. Raven--in
a low voice, as if fearing to disturb his silent guests. "Much
wine is set here to ripen!--But it is dark for a stranger!" he added.
"The moon is rising; she will soon be here," said his wife, and
her clear voice, low and sweet, sounded of ancient sorrow long
bidden adieu.
Even as she spoke the moon looked in at an opening in the wall, and
a thousand gleams of white responded to her shine. But not yet
could I descry beginning or end of the couches. They stretched away
and away, as if for all the disparted world to sleep upon. For
along the far receding narrow ways, every couch stood by itself, and
on each slept a lonely sleeper. I thought at first their sleep was
death, but I soon saw it was something deeper still--a something I
did not know.
The moon rose higher, and shone through other openings, but I
could never see enough of the place at once to know its shape or
character; now it would resemble a long cathedral nave, now a huge
barn made into a dwelling of tombs. She looked colder than any
moon in the frostiest night of the world, and where she shone direct
upon them, cast a bluish, icy gleam on the white sheets and the
pallid countenances--but it might be the faces that made the moon
so cold!
Of such as I could see, all were alike in the brotherhood of death,
all unlike in the character and history recorded upon them. Here
lay a man who had died--for although this was not death, I have no
other name to give it--in the prime of manly strength; his dark
beard seemed to flow like a liberated stream from the glacier of
his frozen countenance; his forehead was smooth as polished marble;
a shadow of pain lingered about his lips, but only a shadow. On
the next couch lay the form of a girl, passing lovely to behold.
The sadness left on her face by parting was not yet absorbed in
perfect peace, but absolute submission possessed the placid features,
which bore no sign of wasting disease, of "killing care or grief
of heart": if pain had been there, it was long charmed asleep, never
again to wake. Many were the beautiful that there lay very still--
some of them mere children; but I did not see one infant. The
most beautiful of all was a lady whose white hair, and that alone,
suggested her old when first she fell asleep. On her stately
countenance rested--not submission, but a right noble acquiescence,
an assurance, firm as the foundations of the universe, that all was
as it should be. On some faces lingered the almost obliterated
scars of strife, the marrings of hopeless loss, the fading shadows
of sorrows that had seemed inconsolable: the aurora of the great
morning had not yet quite melted them away; but those faces were
few, and every one that bore such brand of pain seemed to plead,
"Pardon me: I died only yesterday!" or, "Pardon me: I died but a
century ago!" That some had been dead for ages I knew, not merely
by their unutterable repose, but by something for which I have
neither word nor symbol.
We came at last to three empty couches, immediately beyond which
lay the form of a beautiful woman, a little past the prime of life.
One of her arms was outside the sheet, and her hand lay with the
palm upward, in its centre a dark spot. Next to her was the
stalwart figure of a man of middle age. His arm too was outside
the sheet, the strong hand almost closed, as if clenched on the grip
of a sword. I thought he must be a king who had died fighting for
the truth.
"Will you hold the candle nearer, wife?" whispered the sexton,
bending down to examine the woman's hand.
"It heals well," he murmured to himself: "the nail found in her
nothing to hurt!"
At last I ventured to speak.
"Are they not dead?" I asked softly.
"I cannot answer you," he replied in a subdued voice. "I almost
forget what they mean by DEAD in the old world. If I said a person
was dead, my wife would understand one thing, and you would imagine
another.--This is but one of my treasure vaults," he went on, "and
all my guests are not laid in vaults: out there on the moor they
lie thick as the leaves of a forest after the first blast of your
winter--thick, let me say rather, as if the great white rose of
heaven had shed its petals over it. All night the moon reads their
faces, and smiles."
"But why leave them in the corrupting moonlight?" I asked.
"Our moon," he answered, "is not like yours--the old cinder of a
burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them. You
observe that here the sexton lays his dead on the earth; be buries
very few under it! In your world he lays huge stones on them,
as if to keep them down; I watch for the hour to ring the
resurrection-bell, and wake those that are still asleep. Your
sexton looks at the clock to know when to ring the dead-alive to
church; I hearken for the cock on the spire to crow; `AWAKE, THOU
THAT SLEEPEST, AND ARISE FROM THE DEAD!'"
I began to conclude that the self-styled sexton was in truth an
insane parson: the whole thing was too mad! But how was I to get
away from it? I was helpless! In this world of the dead, the
raven and his wife were the only living I had yet seen: whither
should I turn for help? I was lost in a space larger than
imagination; for if here two things, or any parts of them, could
occupy the same space, why not twenty or ten thousand?--But I dared
not think further in that direction.
"You seem in your dead to see differences beyond my perception!" I
ventured to remark.
"None of those you see," he answered, "are in truth quite dead yet,
and some have but just begun to come alive and die. Others had
begun to die, that is to come alive, long before they came to us;
and when such are indeed dead, that instant they will wake and leave
us. Almost every night some rise and go. But I will not say more,
for I find my words only mislead you!--This is the couch that has
been waiting for you," he ended, pointing to one of the three.
"Why just this?" I said, beginning to tremble, and anxious by
parley to delay.
"For reasons which one day you will be glad to know," he answered.
"Why not know them now?"
"That also you will know when you wake."
"But these are all dead, and I am alive!" I objected, shuddering.
"Not much," rejoined the sexton with a smile, "--not nearly enough!
Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not
death!"
"The place is too cold to let one sleep!" I said.
"Do these find it so?" he returned. "They sleep well--or will soon.
Of cold they feel not a breath: it heals their wounds.--Do not be a
coward, Mr. Vane. Turn your back on fear, and your face to whatever
may come. Give yourself up to the night, and you will rest indeed.
Harm will not come to you, but a good you cannot foreknow."
The sexton and I stood by the side of the couch, his wife, with the
candle in her hand, at the foot of it. Her eyes were full of light,
but her face was again of a still whiteness; it was no longer radiant.
"Would they have me make of a charnel-house my bed-chamber?" I
cried aloud. "I will not. I will lie abroad on the heath; it
cannot be colder there!"
"I have just told you that the dead are there also,
`Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa,'"
said the librarian.
"I will NOT," I cried again; and in the compassing dark, the two
gleamed out like spectres that waited on the dead; neither answered
me; each stood still and sad, and looked at the other.
"Be of good comfort; we watch the flock of the great shepherd,"
said the sexton to his wife.
Then he turned to me.
"Didst thou not find the air of the place pure and sweet when thou
enteredst it?" he asked.
"Yes; but oh, so cold!" I answered.
"Then know," he returned, and his voice was stern, "that thou who
callest thyself alive, hast brought into this chamber the odours
of death, and its air will not be wholesome for the sleepers until
thou art gone from it!"
They went farther into the great chamber, and I was left alone in
the moonlight with the dead.
I turned to escape.
What a long way I found it back through the dead! At first I was
too angry to be afraid, but as I grew calm, the still shapes grew
terrible. At last, with loud offence to the gracious silence, I
ran, I fled wildly, and, bursting out, flung-to the door behind me.
It closed with an awful silence.
I stood in pitch-darkness. Feeling about me, I found a door, opened
it, and was aware of the dim light of a lamp. I stood in my library,
with the handle of the masked door in my hand.
Had I come to myself out of a vision?--or lost myself by going back
to one? Which was the real--what I now saw, or what I had just
ceased to see? Could both be real, interpenetrating yet unmingling?
I threw myself on a couch, and fell asleep.
In the library was one small window to the east, through which, at
this time of the year, the first rays of the sun shone upon a mirror
whence they were reflected on the masked door: when I woke, there
they shone, and thither they drew my eyes. With the feeling that
behind it must lie the boundless chamber I had left by that door,
I sprang to my feet, and opened it. The light, like an eager hound,
shot before me into the closet, and pounced upon the gilded edges
of a large book.
"What idiot," I cried, "has put that book in the shelf the wrong
way?"
But the gilded edges, reflecting the light a second time, flung it
on a nest of drawers in a dark corner, and I saw that one of them
was half open.
"More meddling!" I cried, and went to close the drawer.
It contained old papers, and seemed more than full, for it would
not close. Taking the topmost one out, I perceived that it was
in my father's writing and of some length. The words on which first
my eyes fell, at once made me eager to learn what it contained. I
carried it to the library, sat down in one of the western windows,
and read what follows.
