第56章 SKETCHES(3)

'Such are the results of education,'thought I as I passed beside them and came fairly among the tombs.Here,at least,there were no commonplace politics,no diluted this-morning's leader,to distract or offend me.The old shabby church showed,as usual,its quaint extent of roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable,still blackened with the fire of thirty years ago.A chill dank mist lay over all.The Old Greyfriars' churchyard was in perfection that morning,and one could go round and reckon up the associations with no fear of vulgar interruption.On this stone the Covenant was signed.In that vault,as the story goes,John Knox took hiding in some Reformation broil.From that window Burke the murderer looked out many a time across the tombs,and perhaps o'nights let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made grave.Certainly he would have a selection here.The very walks have been carried over forgotten resting-places;and the whole ground is uneven,because (as I was once quaintly told)'when the wood rots it stands to reason the soil should fall in,'which,from the law of gravitation,is certainly beyond denial.But it is round the boundary that there are the finest tombs.The whole irregular space is,as it were,fringed with quaint old monuments,rich in death's-heads and scythes and hour-glasses,and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and Latin mottoes -rich in them to such an extent that their proper space has run over,and they have crawled end-long up the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.These tombs raise their backs against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses,and every here and there a clothes-pole projects between two monuments its fluttering trophy of white and yellow and red.

With a grim irony they recall the banners in the Invalides,banners as appropriate perhaps over the sepulchres of tailors and weavers as these others above the dust of armies.Why they put things out to dry on that particular morning it was hard to imagine.The grass was grey with drops of rain,the headstones black with moisture.Yet,in despite of weather and common sense,there they hung between the tombs;and beyond them I could see through open windows into miserable rooms where whole families were born and fed,and slept and died.At one a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard;and from another came the shrill tones of a scolding woman.Every here and there was a town garden full of sickly flowers,or a pile of crockery inside upon the window-seat.But you do not grasp the full connection between these houses of the dead and the living,the unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid houses,till,lower down,where the road has sunk far below the surface of the cemetery,and the very roofs are scarcely on a level with its wall,you observe that a proprietor has taken advantage of a tall monument and trained a chimney-stack against its back.It startles you to see the red,modern pots peering over the shoulder of the tomb.

A man was at work on a grave,his spade clinking away the drift of bones that permeates the thin brown soil;but my first disappointment had taught me to expect little from Greyfriars' sextons,and I passed him by in silence.Aslater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me curiously.

A lean black cat,looking as if it had battened on strange meats,slipped past me.A little boy at a window put his finger to his nose in so offensive a manner that I was put upon my dignity,and turned grandly off to read old epitaphs and peer through the gratings into the shadow of vaults.

Just then I saw two women coming down a path,one of them old,and the other younger,with a child in her arms.Both had faces eaten with famine and hardened with sin,and both had reached that stage of degradation,much lower in a woman than a man,when all care for dress is lost.As they came down they neared a grave,where some pious friend or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles,and put a bell glass over it,as is the custom.The effect of that ring of dull yellow among so many blackened and dusty sculptures was more pleasant than it is in modern cemeteries,where every second mound can boast a similar coronal;and here,where it was the exception and not the rule,I could even fancy the drops of moisture that dimmed the covering were the tears of those who laid it where it was.As the two women came up to it,one of them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked long and silently through the clouded shade,while the second stood above her,gently oscillating to and fro to lull the muling baby.I was struck a great way off with something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard women;and Idrew near faster,but still cautiously,to hear what they were saying.Surely on them the spirit of death and decay had descended;I had no education to dread here:should I not have a chance of seeing nature?Alas!a pawnbroker could not have been more practical and commonplace,for this was what the kneeling woman said to the woman upright -this and nothing more:'Eh,what extravagance!'

O nineteenth century,wonderful art thou indeed -wonderful,but wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity.Thy men are more like numerals than men.They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions written on a placard about their neck,like the scenery in Shakespeare's theatre.

Thy precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest ranks of life;and there is now a decorum in vice,a respectability among the disreputable,a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia.For lo!thy very gravediggers talk politics;and thy castaways kneel upon new graves,to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love.

Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates again,happily satisfied in myself,and feeling that I alone of all whom I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green mounds and blackened headstones.