From a Swedish Homestead

by Selma Lagerlöf

You can understand that if there were much sorrowing over one grave, it would not look well for those over whom no one sorrowed. They know what they were about at Svartsjö. They do as it has been the custom to do there for many hundred years. But whilst you stand there, on the church hill, you are a great and important personage, although you receive neither flowers nor tears. No one comes to church without asking who you are, and then they go quietly up to you and stand and gaze at you; and it never occurs to anyone to wound the dead by pitying him. No one says anything but that it is well for him that it is all over.

It is not at all as it is in a town, where you can be buried any day. At Svartsjö you must be buried on a Sunday, so that you can have the whole parish around you. There you will have standing near your coffin both the girl with whom you danced at the last midsummer night's festival and the man with whom you exchanged horses at the last fair. You will have the schoolmaster who took so much trouble with you when you were a little lad, and who had forgotten you, although you remembered him so well; and you will have the old Member of Parliament who never before thought it worth his while to bow to you. This is not as in a town, where people hardly turn round when you are carried past. When they bring the long bands and place them under the coffin, there is not one who does not watch the proceedings.

You cannot imagine what a churchwarden we have at Svartsjö. He is an old soldier, and he looks like a Field-Marshal. He has short white hair and twisted moustaches, and a pointed imperial; he is slim and tall and straight, with a light and firm step. On Sundays he wears a well-brushed frock-coat of fine cloth. He really looks a very fine old gentleman, and it is he who walks at the head of the procession. Then comes the verger. Not that the verger is to be compared with the churchwarden. It is more than probable that his Sunday hat is too large and old-fashioned; as likely as not he is awkward—but when is a verger not awkward?

Then you come next in your coffin, with the six bearers, and then follow the clergyman and the clerk and the Town Council and the whole parish. All the congregation will follow you to the churchyard, you may be sure of that. But I will tell you something: All those who follow you look so small and poor. They are not fine town's-people, you know—only plain, simple Svartsjö folk. There is only one who is great and important, and that is you in your coffin—you who are dead.

The others the next day will have to resume their heavy and toilsome work. They will have to live in poor old cottages and wear old, patched clothes; the others will always be plagued and worried, and dragged down and humbled by poverty.

Those who follow you to your grave become far more sad by looking at the living than by thinking of you who are dead. You need not look any more at the velvet collar of your coat to see if it is not getting worn at the edges; you need not make a special fold of your silk handkerchief to hide that it is beginning to fray; you will never more be compelled to ask the village shopkeeper to let you have goods on credit; you will not find out that your strength is failing; you will not have to wait for the day when you must go on the parish.

While they are following you to the grave everyone will be thinking that it is best to be dead—better to soar heavenwards, carried on the white clouds of the morning—than to be always experiencing life's manifold troubles. When they come to the wall of the churchyard, where the grave has been made, the bands are exchanged for strong ropes, and people get on to the loose earth and lower you down. And when this has been done the clerk advances to the grave and begins to sing: 'I walk towards death.'

He sings the hymn quite alone; neither the clergyman nor any of the congregation help him. But the clerk must sing; however keen the north wind and however glaring the sun which shines straight in his face, sing he does.

The clerk, however, is getting old now, and he has not much voice left; he is quite aware that it does not sound as well now as formerly when he sang people into their graves; but he does it all the same—it is part of his duty. For the day, you understand, when his voice quite fails him, so that he cannot sing any more, he must resign his office, and this means downright poverty for him. Therefore the whole gathering stands in apprehension while the old clerk sings, wondering whether his voice will last through the whole verse. But no one joins him, not a single person, for that would not do; it is not the custom. People never sing at a grave at Svartsjö. People do not sing in the church either, except the first hymn on Christmas Day morning.

Still, if one listened very attentively, one could hear that the clerk does not sing alone. There really is another voice, but it sounds so exactly the same that the two voices blend as if they were only one. The other who sings is a little old man in a long, coarse gray coat. He is still older than the clerk, but he gives out all the voice he has to help him. And the voice, as I have told you, is exactly the same kind as the clerk's; they are so alike one cannot help wondering at it.