Other people seem to manage it very comfortably and quite regularly. On Sunday morning our quiet little road, unfrequented even by the ubiquitous automobile, is gay with church-goers. "Gay" may seem the wrong word, but it is quite the right one. In the city church-going is rather a sober affair. People either walk or take cars. They wear a certain sort of clothes, known as "church clothes," which represent a sort of hedging compromise between their morning and their afternoon wear. They approach the church in decorous silence; as they emerge they exchange subdued greetings, walk a block or two in little companies, then scatter to their homes and their Sunday dinners.
But in the country everybody but the village people drives, and the roads are full of teams,—buggies, surreys, phaetons,—the carriages newly washed, the horses freshly groomed, the occupants scrupulously dressed in the prettiest things they own—their "Sunday-go-to-meeting" ones, which means something quite different from "church clothes." As one nears the village there is some friendly rivalry between horses, there is the pleasure of "catching up" with neighbors' teams, or of being caught up with, and at the church door there is the business of alighting and hitching the horses, and then, if it is early, waiting about outside for the "last bell" before going in.
Even in the church itself there is more freedom and variety than in our city tabernacles. In these there are always the same memorial windows to look at,—except perhaps once in ten years when somebody dies and a new one goes in,—but in the country stained glass is more rare. In many it has not even gained place at all, and the panes of clear glass let in a glory of blueness and whiteness and greenness to rejoice the heart of the worshiper. In others, more ambitious, alas! there is ground glass with tinted borders; but this is not very disturbing, especially when the sashes are set open aslant, and the ivy and Virginia creeper cluster just outside, in bright greens and dark, or cast their shifting shadows on the glass, a dainty tracery of gray on silver.
And at the altar there are flowers—not florist flowers, contracted for by the year, but neighborhood flowers. There are Mrs. Cummings's peonies—she always has such beauties; and Mrs. Hiram Brown's roses—nobody else has any of just that shade of yellow; and Mary Lord's foxgloves and larkspur—what a wonder of yellow and white and blue! Each in its season, the flowers are full of personal significance. The choir, too, is made up of our friends. There is Hiram Brown, and Jennie Sewall, and young Mrs. Harris, back for three weeks to visit her mother, and little Sally Winter, a shy new recruit, very pink over her promotion. The singing is perhaps not as finished as that of a paid quartette, but it is full of life and sweetness, and it makes a direct human appeal that the other often misses.
After the service people go out slowly, waiting for this friend and that, and in the vestibule and on the steps and in the church-yard they gather in groups. The men saunter off to the sheds to get the horses, and the women chat while they wait. Then the teams come up, as many as the roadway will hold, and there is the bustle of departure, the taking of seats, the harsh grinding of wheels against the wagon body as the driver "cramps" to turn round, then good-byes, and one after another the teams start off, out into the open country for another week of quiet, busy farm life.
Yes, church is distinctively a social affair, and very delightful, and when our cows and hens and calves and other "critters" do not prevent, we are glad to have our part in it all. When they do, we yet feel that we have a share in it simply through seeing "the folks" go by. It is a distinct pleasure to see our neighbors trundling along towards the village. And then, if luck has been against us and we cannot join them, it is a pleasure to lie in the grass and listen to the quiet. After the last church-goers have passed, the road is deserted for two hours, until they begin to return. The neighboring farms are quiet, the "folks" are away, or, if some of the men are at home, they are sitting on their doorsteps smoking.
If there is no wind, or if it is in the right quarter, we can hear the church bells, faintly now, and now very clear; there is the First Church bell, and the Baptist; there is St. John's, on a higher note, and Trinity, a little lower. After a time even the bells cease, and there is no sound but the wind in the big maples and the bees as they drone among the flower heads.
Sunday, at least Sunday on a Connecticut farm, has a distinct quality of its own. I can hardly say what it means to me—no one, I suppose, could say all that it means. To call it a day of rest does not individualize it enough. It has to be described not so much in terms of rest as of balance and height. I think of the week as a long, sweeping curve, like the curve of a swift, deep wave at sea, and Sunday is the crest, the moment of poise, before one is drawn down into the next great concave, then up again, to pause and look off, and it is Sunday once more.
The weather does not matter. If it rains, you get one kind of pause and outlook—the intimate, indoor kind. If the sun shines, you get another kind—wide and bright. And what you do does not matter so long as it is different from the week, and so long as it expresses and develops that peculiar Sunday quality of balance and height. I can imagine nothing drearier than seven days all alike, and seven more, and seven more! Sundays are the big beads on the chain. They need not be all of the same color, but there must be the big beads to satisfy the eye and the finger-tip.
And a New England Sunday always is different. Whatever changes may have come or may be coming elsewhere, in New England Sunday has its own atmosphere. Over the fields and woods and rocks there is a sense of poise between reminiscence and expectancy. The stir of the morning church-going brightens but does not mar this. It adds the human note—rather not a note, but a quiet chord of many tones. And after it comes a hush. The early afternoon of a New England Sunday is the most absolutely quiet thing imaginable. It is the precise middle of the wave crest, the moment when motion ceases.