The End of All Living

 The End of All Living

The First Church of Tiverton stands on a hill, whence it overlooks the little 

village, with one or two pine-shaded neighborhoods beyond, and, when 

the air is clear, a thin blue line of upland delusively like the sea. Set thus 

austerely aloft, it seems now a survival of the day when men used to go 

to meeting gun in hand, and when one stayed, a lookout by the door, to 

watch and listen. But this the present dwellers do not remember. 

Conceding not a sigh to the holy and strenuous past, they lament--and 

the more as they grow older--the stiff climb up the hill, albeit to rest in so 

sweet a sanctuary at the top. For it is sweet indeed. A soft little wind 

seems always to be stirring there, on summer Sundays a messenger of 

good. It runs whispering about, and wafts in all sorts of odors: honey of 

the milkweed and wild rose, and a Christmas tang of the evergreens just 

below. It carries away something, too--scents calculated to bewilder the 

thrift-hunting bee: sometimes a whiff of peppermint from an old lady's 

pew, but oftener the breath of musk and southernwood, gathered in 

ancient gardens, and borne up here to embroider the preacher's drowsy 

homilies, and remind us, when we faint, of the keen savor of 

righteousness. 

Here in the church do we congregate from week to week; but behind it, 

on a sloping hillside, is the last home of us all, the old burying-ground, 

overrun with a briery tangle, and relieved by Nature's sweet and cunning 

hand from the severe decorum set ordinarily about the dead. Our very 

faithlessness has made it fair. There was a time when we were a little 

ashamed of it. We regarded it with affection, indeed, but affection of the 

sort accorded some rusty relative who has lain too supine in the rut of 

years. Thus, with growing ambition came, in due course, the project of a 

new burying-ground. This we dignified, even in common speech; it was 

always grandly "the Cemetery." While it lay unrealized in the distance, the 

home of our forbears fell into neglect, and Nature marched in, according 

to her lavishness, and adorned what we ignored. The white alder crept 

farther and farther from its bounds; tansy and wild rose rioted in 

profusion, and soft patches of violets smiled to meet the spring. Here 

were, indeed, great riches, "a little of everything" that pasture life affords: a hardy bed of checkerberry, crimson strawberries nodding on 

long stalks, and in one sequestered corner the beloved Linnaea. It 

seemed a consecrated pasture shut off from daily use, and so given up to 

pleasantness that you could scarcely walk there without setting foot on 

some precious outgrowth of the spring, or pushing aside a summer 

loveliness better made for wear. 

Ambition had its fulfillment. We bought our Cemetery, a large, green 

tract, quite square, and lying open to the sun. But our pendulum had 

swung too wide. Like many folk who suffer from one discomfort, we had 

gone to the utmost extreme and courted another. We were tired of 

climbing hills, and so we pressed too far into the lowland; and the first 

grave dug in our Cemetery showed three inches of water at the bottom. It 

was in "Prince's new lot," and there his young daughter was to lie. But her 

lover had stood by while the men were making the grave; and, looking 

into the ooze below, he woke to the thought of her fair young body there. 

"God!" they heard him say, "she sha'n't lay so. Leave it as it is, an' come 

up into the old buryin'-ground. There's room enough by me." 

The men, all mates of his, stopped work without a glance and followed 

him; and up there in the dearer shrine her place was made. The father 

said but a word at her changed estate. Neighbors had hurried in to bring 

him the news; he went first to the unfinished grave in the Cemetery, and 

then strode up the hill, where the men had not yet done. After watching 

them for a while in silence, he turned aside; but he came back to drop a 

trembling hand upon the lover's arm. 

"I guess," he said miserably, "she'd full as lieves lay here by you." 

And she will be quite beside him, though, in the beaten ways of earth, 

others have come between. For years he lived silently and apart; but 

when his mother died, and he and his father were left staring at the 

dulled embers of life, he married a good woman, who perhaps does not 

deify early dreams; yet she is tender of them, and at the death of her 

own child it was she who went toiling up to the graveyard, to see that its 

little place did not encroach too far. She gave no reason, but we all knew it was because she meant to let her husband lie there by the long-loved 

guest. 

Naturally enough, after this incident of the forsaken grave, we conceived 

a strange horror of the new Cemetery, and it has remained deserted to 

this day. It is nothing but a meadow now, with that one little grassy 

hollow in it to tell a piteous tale. It is mown by any farmer who chooses to 

take it for a price; but we regard it differently from any other plot of 

ground. It is "the Cemetery," and always will be. We wonder who has 

bought the grass. "Eli's got the Cemetery this year," we say. And 

sometimes awe-stricken little squads of school children lead one another 

there, hand in hand, to look at the grave where Annie Prince was going to 

be buried when her beau took her away. They never seem to connect that 

heart-broken wraith of a lover with the bent farmer who goes to and fro 

driving the cows. He wears patched overalls, and has sciatica in winter; 

but I have seen the gleam of youth awakened, though remotely, in his 

eyes. I do not believe he ever quite forgets; there are moments, now and 

then, at dusk or midnight, all his for poring over those dulled pages of the 

past. 

After we had elected to abide by our old home, we voted an enlargement 

of its bounds; and thereby hangs a tale of outlawed revenge. Long years 

ago "old Abe Eaton" quarreled with his twin brother, and vowed, as the 

last fiat of an eternal divorce, "I won't be buried in the same yard with 

ye!" 

The brother died first; and because he lay within a little knoll beside the 

fence, Abe willfully set a public seal on that iron oath by purchasing a 

strip of land outside, wherein he should himself be buried. Thus they 

would rest in a hollow correspondence, the fence between. It all fell out 

as he ordained, for we in Tiverton are cheerfully willing to give the dead 

their way. Lax enough is the helpless hand in the fictitious stiffness of its 

grasp; and we are not the people to deny it holding, by courtesy at least. 

Soon enough does the sceptre of mortality crumble and fall. So Abe was 

buried according to his wish. But when necessity commanded us to add 

unto ourselves another acre, we took in his grave with it, and the fence, 

falling into decay, was never renewed. There he lies, in affectionate decorum, beside the brother he hated; and thus does the greater good 

wipe out the individual wrong. 

So now, as in ancient times, we toil steeply up here, with the dead upon 

his bier; for not often in Tiverton do we depend on that uncouth 

monstrosity, the hearse. It is not that we do not own one,--a rigid box of 

that name has belonged to us now for many a year; and when Sudleigh 

came out with a new one, plumes, trappings, and all, we broached the 

idea of emulating her. But the project fell through after Brad Freeman's 

contented remark that he guessed the old one would last us out. He 

"never heard no complaint from anybody 't ever rode in it." That placed 

our last journey on a homely, humorous basis, and we smiled, and 

reflected that we preferred going up the hill borne by friendly hands, with 

the light of heaven falling on our coffin-lids. 

The antiquary would set much store by our headstones, did he ever find 

them out. Certain of them are very ancient, according to our ideas; for 

they came over from England, and are now fallen into the grayness of 

age. They are woven all over with lichens, and the blackberry binds them 

fast. Well, too, for them! They need the grace of some such veiling; for 

most of them are alive, even to this day, with warning skulls, and awful 

cherubs compounded of bleak, bald faces and sparsely feathered wings. 

One discovery, made there on a summer day, has not, I fancy, been 

duplicated in another New England town. On six of the larger tombstones 

are carved, below the grass level, a row of tiny imps, grinning faces and 

humanized animals. Whose was the hand that wrought? The Tivertonians 

know nothing about it. They say there was a certain old Veasey who, 

some eighty odd years ago, used to steal into the graveyard with his 

tools, and there, for love, scrape the mosses from the stones and chip the 

letters clear. He liked to draw, "creatur's" especially, and would trace 

them for children on their slates. He lived alone in a little house long since 

fallen, and he would eat no meat. That is all they know of him. I can 

guess but one thing more: that when no looker-on was by, he pushed 

away the grass, and wrote his little jokes, safe in the kindly tolerance of 

the dead. This was the identical soul who should, in good old days, have 

been carving gargoyles and misereres; here his only field was the 

obscurity of Tiverton churchyard, his only monument these grotesqueries 

so cunningly concealed. We have epitaphs, too,--all our own as yet, for the world has not 

discovered them. One couple lies in well-to-do respectability under a tiny 

monument not much taller than the conventional gravestone, but shaped 

on a pretentious model. 

"We'd ruther have it nice," said the builders, "even if there ain't much of 

it." 

These were Eliza Marden and Peleg her husband, who worked from sun to 

sun, with scant reward save that of pride in their own fore-handedness. I 

can imagine them as they drove to church in the open wagon, a couple 

portentously large and prosperous: their one child, Hannah, sitting 

between them, and glancing about her, in a flickering, intermittent way, 

at the pleasant holiday world. Hannah was no worker; she liked a long 

afternoon in the sun, her thin little hands busied about nothing weightier 

than crochet; and her mother regarded her with a horrified patience, as 

one who might some time be trusted to sow all her wild oats of idleness.

The well-mated pair died within the same year, and it was Hannah who 

composed their epitaph, with an artistic accuracy, but a defective sense of 

rhyme:--

"Here lies Eliza

She was a striver

Here lies Peleg

He was a select Man"

We townsfolk found something haunting and bewildering in the lines; they 

drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested echoes luring only to 

betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always cherished the 

belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and their 

possibilities. Still, we accepted her one crowning achievement, and never 

urged her to further proof. In Tiverton we never look genius in the mouth. 

Nor did Hannah herself propose developing her gift. Relieved from the 

spur of those two unquiet spirits who had begotten her, she settled down to sit all day in the sun, learning new patterns of crochet; and having 

cheerfully let her farm run down, she died at last in a placid poverty. 

Then there was Desire Baker, who belonged to the era of colonial 

hardship, and who, through a redundant punctuation, is relegated to a 

day still more remote. For some stone-cutter, scornful of working by the 

card, or born with an inordinate taste for periods, set forth, below her 

_obiit_, the astounding statement:--

"The first woman. She made the journey to Boston. By stage." 

Here, too, are the ironies whereof departed life is prodigal. This is the tidy 

lot of Peter Merrick, who had a desire to stand well with the world, in 

leaving it, and whose purple and fine linen were embodied in the pomp of 

death. He was a cobbler, and he put his small savings together to erect a 

modest monument to his own memory. Every Sunday he visited it, "after 

meetin'," and perhaps his day-dreams, as he sat leather-aproned on his 

bench, were still of that white marble idealism. The inscription upon it was 

full of significant blanks; they seemed an interrogation of the destiny 

which governs man. 

"Here lies Peter Merrick----" ran the unfinished scroll, "and his wife who 

died----" 

But ambitious Peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime, with one 

flash of sharp desire to see the world, he went on a voyage to the Banks, 

and was drowned. And his wife? The story grows somewhat threadbare. 

She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and he, a marble-

cutter by trade, filled in the date of Peter's death with letters English and 

illegible. In the process of their carving, the widow stood by, hands folded 

under her apron from the midsummer sun. The two got excellent well 

acquainted, and the stone-cutter prolonged his stay. He came again in a 

little over a year, at Thanksgiving time, and they were married. Which 

shows that nothing is certain in life,--no, not the proprieties of our leaving 

it,--and that even there we must walk softly, writing no boastful legend 

for time to annul. At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in Tiverton; it was the 

epitaph of the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you picture 

to yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless, indeed, it had been 

copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and transplanted 

through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts were ever 

flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:--

"Dear husband, now my life is passed,

You have dearly loved me to the last.

Grieve not for me, but pity take

On my dear children for my sake."

But one sorrowing widower amended it, according to his wife's direction, 

so that it bore a new and significant meaning. He was charged to 

"pity take

On my dear parent for my sake."

The lesson was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and 

she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on 

the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without 

her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no 

more forgotten while she herself should be remembered. 

The husband was a silent man. He said very little about his intentions; 

performance was enough for him. Therefore it happened that his 

"parent," adopted perforce, knew nothing about this public charge until 

she came upon it, on her first Sunday visit, surveying the new glory of the 

stone. The story goes that she stood before it, a square, portentous figure 

in black alpaca and warlike mitts, and that she uttered these irrevocable 

words:--

"Pity on _me_! Well, I guess he won't! I'll go to the poor-farm fust!" And Monday morning, spite of his loyal dissuasions, she packed her "blue 

chist," and drove off to a far-away cousin, who got her "nussin'" to do. 

Another lesson from the warning finger of Death: let what was life not 

dream that it can sway the life that is, after the two part company. 

Not always were mothers-in-law such breakers of the peace. There is a 

story in Tiverton of one man who went remorsefully mad after his wife's 

death, and whose mind dwelt unceasingly on the things he had denied 

her. These were not many, yet the sum seemed to him colossal. It piled 

the Ossa of his grief. Especially did he writhe under the remembrance of 

certain blue dishes she had desired the week before her sudden death; 

and one night, driven by an insane impulse to expiate his blindness, he 

walked to town, bought them, and placed them in a foolish order about 

her grave. It was a puerile, crazy deed, but no one smiled, not even the 

little children who heard of it next day, on the way home from school, and 

went trudging up there to see. To their stirring minds it seemed a strange 

departure from the comfortable order of things, chiefly because their 

elders stood about with furtive glances at one another and murmurs of 

"Poor creatur'!" But one man, wiser than the rest, "harnessed up," and 

went to tell the dead woman's mother, a mile away. Jonas was 

"shackled;" he might "do himself a mischief." In the late afternoon, the 

guest so summoned walked quietly into the silent house, where Jonas sat 

by the window, beating one hand incessantly upon the sill, and staring at 

the air. His sister, also, had come; she was frightened, however, and had 

betaken herself to the bedroom, to sob. But in walked this little plump, 

soft-footed woman, with her banded hair, her benevolent spectacles, and 

her atmosphere of calm. 

"I guess I'll blaze a fire, Jonas," said she. "You step out an' git me a mite 

o' kindlin'."

The air of homely living enwrapped him once again, and mechanically, 

with the inertia of old habit, he obeyed. They had a "cup o' tea" together; 

and then, when the dishes were washed, and the peaceful twilight began 

to settle down upon them like a sifting mist, she drew a little rocking chair 

to the window where he sat opposite, and spoke. "Jonas," said she, in that still voice which had been harmonized by the 

experiences of life, "arter dark, you jest go up an' bring home them blue 

dishes. Mary's got an awful lot o' fun in her, an' if she ain't laughin' over 

that, I'm beat. Now, Jonas, you do it! Do you s'pose she wants them nice 

blue pieces out there through wind an' weather? She'd ruther by half see 

'em on the parlor cluzzet shelves; an' if you'll fetch 'em home, I'll scallop 

some white paper, jest as she liked, an' we'll set 'em up there." 

Jonas wakened a little from his mental swoon. Life seemed warmer, more 

tangible, again. 

"Law, do go," said the mother soothingly. "She don't want the whole 

township tramplin' up there to eye over her chiny. Make her as nervous 

as a witch. Here's the ha'-bushel basket, an' some paper to put between 

'em. You go, Jonas, an' I'll clear off the shelves." 

So Jonas, whether he was tired of guiding the impulses of his own unquiet 

mind, or whether he had become a child again, glad to yield to the 

maternal, as we all do in our grief, took the basket and went. He stood 

by, still like a child, while this comfortable woman put the china on the 

shelves, speaking warmly, as she worked, of the pretty curving of the 

cups, and her belief that the pitcher was "one you could pour out of." She 

stayed on at the house, and Jonas, through his sickness of the mind, lay 

back upon her soothing will as a baby lies in its mother's arms. But the 

china was never used, even when he had come to his normal estate, and 

bought and sold as before. The mother's prescience was too keen for that. 

Here in this ground are the ambiguities of life carried over into that other 

state, its pathos and its small misunderstandings. This was a much-

married man whose last spouse had been a triple widow. Even to him the 

situation proved mathematically complex, and the sumptuous stone to 

her memory bears the dizzying legend that "Enoch Nudd who erects this 

stone is her fourth husband and his fifth wife." Perhaps it was the 

exigencies of space which brought about this amazing elision; but surely, 

in its very apparent intention, there is only a modest pride. For 

indubitably the much-married may plume themselves upon being also the 

widely sought. If it is the crown of sex to be desired, here you have it, under seal of the civil bond. No baseless, windy boasting that "I might an 

if I would!" Nay, here be the marriage ties to testify. 

In this pleasant, weedy corner is a little white stone, not so long erected. 

"I shall arise in thine image," runs the inscription; and reading it, you 

shall remember that the dust within belonged to a little hunchback, who 

played the fiddle divinely, and had beseeching eyes. With that cry he 

escaped from the marred conditions of the clay. Here, too (for this is a 

sort of bachelor nook), is the grave of a man whom we unconsciously 

thrust into a permanent masquerade. Years and years ago he broke into a 

house,--an unknown felony in our quiet limits,--and was incontinently 

shot. The burglar lost his arm, and went about at first under a cloud of 

disgrace and horror, which became, with healing of the public conscience, 

a veil of sympathy. After his brief imprisonment indoors, during the 

healing of the mutilated stump, he came forth among us again, a man 

sadder and wiser in that he had learned how slow and sure may be the 

road to wealth. He had sown his wild oats in one night's foolish work, and 

now he settled down to doing such odd jobs as he might with one hand. 

We got accustomed to his loss. Those of us who were children when it 

happened never really discovered that it was disgrace at all; we called it 

misfortune, and no one said us nay. Then one day it occurred to us that 

he must have been shot "in the war," and so, all unwittingly to himself, 

the silent man became a hero. We accepted him. He was part of our 

poetic time, and when he died, we held him still in remembrance among 

those who fell worthily. When Decoration Day was first observed in 

Tiverton, one of us thought of him, and dropped some apple blossoms on 

his grave; and so it had its posy like the rest, although it bore no flag. It 

was the doctor who set us right there. "I wouldn't do that," he said, 

withholding the hand of one unthinking child; and she took back her flag. 

But she left the blossoms, and, being fond of precedent, we still do the 

same; unless we stop to think, we know not why. You may say there is 

here some perfidy to the republic and the honored dead, or at least some 

laxity of morals. We are lax, indeed, but possibly that is why we are so 

kind. We are not willing to "hurt folks' feelings" even when they have 

migrated to another star; and a flower more or less from the overplus 

given to men who made the greater choice will do no harm, tossed to one 

whose soul may be sitting, like Lazarus, at their riches' gate. But of all these fleeting legends made to, hold the soul a moment on its 

way, and keep it here in fickle permanence, one is more dramatic than 

all, more charged with power and pathos. Years ago there came into 

Tiverton an unknown man, very handsome, showing the marks of high 

breeding, and yet in his bearing strangely solitary and remote. He wore a 

cloak, and had a foreign look. He came walking into the town one night, 

with dust upon his shoes, and we judged that he had been traveling a 

long time. He had the appearance of one who was not nearly at his 

journey's end, and would pass through the village, continuing on a longer 

way. He glanced at no one, but we all stared at him. He seemed, though 

we had not the words to put it so, an exiled prince. He went straight 

through Tiverton Street until he came to the parsonage; and something 

about it (perhaps its garden, hot with flowers, larkspur, coreopsis, and 

the rest) detained his eye, and he walked in. Next day the old doctor was 

there also with his little black case, but we were none the wiser for that; 

for the old doctor was of the sort who intrench themselves in a 

professional reserve. You might draw up beside the road to question him, 

but you could as well deter the course of nature. He would give the roan a 

flick, and his sulky would flash by. 

"What's the matter with so-and-so?" would ask a mousing neighbor. 

"He's sick," ran the laconic reply. 

"Goin' to die?" one daring querist ventured further. 

"Some time," said the doctor. 

But though he assumed a right to combat thus the outer world, no one 

was gentler with a sick man or with those about him in their grief. To the 

latter he would speak; but he used to say he drew his line at second 

cousins. 

Into his hands and the true old parson's fell the stranger's confidence, if 

confidence it were. He may have died solitary and unexplained; but no 

matter what he said, his story was safe. In a week he was carried out for 

burial; and so solemn was the parson's manner as he spoke a brief 

service over him, so thrilling his enunciation of the words "our brother," that we dared not even ask what else he should be called. And we never 

knew. The headstone, set up by the parson, bore the words "Peccator 

Maximus." For a long time we thought they made the stranger's name, 

and, judged that he must have been a foreigner; but a new 

schoolmistress taught us otherwise. It was Latin, she said, and it meant 

"the chiefest among sinners." When that report flew round, the parson 

got wind of it, and then, in the pulpit one morning, he announced that he 

felt it necessary to say that the words had been used "at our brother's 

request," and that it was his own decision to write below them, "For this 

cause came I into the world." 

We have accepted the stranger as we accept many things in Tiverton. 

Parson and doctor kept his secret well. He is quite safe from our 

questioning; but for years I expected a lady, always young and full of 

grief, to seek out his grave and shrive him with her tears. She will not 

appear now, unless she come as an old, old woman, to lie beside him. It 

is too late. 

One more record of our vanished time,--this full of poesy only, and the 

pathos of farewell. It was not the aged and heartsick alone who lay down 

here to rest We have been no more fortunate than others. Youth and 

beauty came also, and returned no more. This, where the white rose-bush 

grows untended, was the young daughter of a squire in far-off days: too 

young to have known the pangs of love or the sweet desire of Death, save 

that, in primrose time, he always paints himself so fair. I have thought 

the inscription must have been borrowed from another grave, in some 

yard shaded by yews and silent under the cawing of the rooks; perhaps, 

from its stiffness, translated from a stately Latin verse. This it is, 

snatched not too soon from oblivion; for a few more years will wear it 

quite away:--

"Here lies the purple flower of a maid

Having to envious Death due tribute paid.

Her sudden Loss her Parents did lament,

And all her Friends with grief their hearts did Rent.

Life's short. Your wicked Lives amend with care,

For Mortals know we Dust and Shadows are." "The purple flower of a maid!" All the blossomy sweetness, the fragrant 

lamenting of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor love-lies-bleeding! 

And yet not poor according to the barren pity we accord the dead, but 

dowered with another youth set like a crown upon the unstained front of 

this. Not going with sparse blossoms ripened or decayed, but heaped with 

buds and dripping over in perfume. She seems so sweet in her still 

loveliness, the empty promise of her balmy spring, that for a moment fain 

are you to snatch her back into the pageant of your day. Reading that 

phrase, you feel the earth is poorer for her loss. And yet not so, since the 

world holds other greater worlds as well. Elsewhere she may have grown 

to age and stature; but here she lives yet in beauteous permanence,--as 

true a part of youth and joy and rapture as the immortal figures on the 

Grecian Urn. While she was but a flying phantom on the frieze of time, 

Death fixed her there forever,--a haunting spirit in perennial bliss.

End