“Let me leave my bag here,” I said, anxious to escape, “and then I will come back later. I want to look around for awhile.”
He accepted this valid excuse and I departed, glad to get out into the rain and the strange town, anxious to find a better-looking place to eat and to see what I could see.
My search for dead or living Dreisers, which I have purposely skipped in order to introduce the town, led me first, as I have said, to the local graveyard—the old “Kirchhof.” It was lowering to a rain as I entered, and the clouds hung in rich black masses over the valley below. It was half-after four by my watch. I made up my mind that I would examine the inscription of every tombstone as quickly as possible, in order to locate all the dead Dreisers, and then get down into the town before the night and the rain fell, and locate the live ones—if any. With that idea in view I began at an upper row, near the church, to work down. Time was when the mere wandering in a graveyard after this fashion would have produced the profoundest melancholy in me. It was so in Paris; it made me morbidly weary and ineffably sad. I saw too many great names—Chopin, Balzac, Daudet, Rachel—solemnly chiseled in stone. And I hurried out, finally, quite agonized and unspeakably lonely.
Here in Mayen it was a simpler feeling that was gradually coming over me—an amused sentimental interest in the simple lives that had had, too often, their beginning and their end in this little village. It was a lovely afternoon for such a search. Spring was already here in South Germany, that faint, tentative suggestion of budding life; all the wind-blown leaves of the preceding fall were on the ground, but in between them new grass was springing and, one might readily suspect, windflowers and crocuses, the first faint green points of lilies and the pulsing tendrils of harebells. It was beginning to sprinkle, the faintest suggestion of a light rain; and in the west, over the roofs and towers of Mayen, a gleam of sunlight broke through the mass of heavy clouds and touched the valley with one last lingering ray.
“Hier ruht im Gott” (Here rests in God), or “Hier sanft ruht” (Here softly rests), was too often the beginning. I had made my way through the sixth or seventh row from the top, pushing away grass at times from in front of faded inscriptions, rubbing other lichen-covered letters clean with a stick and standing interested before recent tombstones. All smart with a very recently developed local idea of setting a black piece of glass into the gray of the marble and on that lettering the names of the departed in gold! It was to me a very thick-witted, truly Teutonic idea, dull and heavy in its mistakes but certainly it was no worse than the Italian idea of putting the photograph of the late beloved in the head of the slab, behind glass in a stone-cut frame and of further ornamenting the graves with ghastly iron-shafted lamps with globes of yellow, pink and green glass. That was the worst of all.
As I was meditating how, oysterlike, little villages reproduce themselves from generation to generation, a few coming and a few going but the majority leading a narrow simple round of existence. I came suddenly, so it seemed to me, upon one grave which gave me a real shock. It was a comparatively recent slab of gray granite with the modern plate of black glass set in it and a Gothic cross surmounting it all at the top. On the glass plate was lettered:
Here Rests
Theodor Dreiser,
Born 16—Feb—1820.
Died 28—Feb—1882.
R. I. P.
I think as clear a notion as I ever had of how my grave will look after I am gone and how utterly unimportant both life and death are, anyhow, came to me then. Something about this old graveyard, the suggestion of the new life of spring, a robin trilling its customary evening song on a near-by twig, the smoke curling upward from the chimneys in the old houses below, the spire of the medieval church and the walls of the medieval castle standing out in the softening light—one or all of them served to give me a sense of the long past that is back of every individual in the race of life and the long future that the race has before it, regardless of the individual. Religion offers no consolation to me. Psychic research and metaphysics, however meditated upon, are in vain. There is in my judgment no death; the universe is composed of life; but, nevertheless, I cannot see any continuous life for any individual. And it would be so unimportant if true. Imagine an eternity of life for a leaf, a fish-worm, an oyster! The best that can be said is that ideas of types survive somewhere in the creative consciousness. That is all. The rest is silence.
Besides this, there were the graves of my father’s brother John, and some other Dreisers; but none of them dated earlier than 1800.