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The Old Grave-Stone
by Hans Christian Andersen
>>> A CULT Publication......1988 <<<
-cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc-
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In a house, with a large courtyard, in a provincial town, at that time
of the year in which people say the evenings are growing longer, a family
circle were gathered together at their old home. A lamp burned on the table,
although the weather was mild and warm, and the long curtains hung down before
the open windows, and without the moon shone brightly in the dark-blue sky.
But they were not talking of the moon, but of a large, old stone that
lay below in the courtyard not very far from the kitchen door. The maids
often laid the clean copper saucepans and kitchen vessels on this stone, that
they might dry in the sun, and the children were fond of playing on it. It
was, in fact, an old grave-stone.
"Yes," said the master of the house, "I believe the stone came from the
graveyard of the old church of the convent which was pulled down, and the
pulpit, the monuments, and the grave-stones sold. My father bought the
latter; most of them were cut in two and used for paving-stones, but that one
stone was preserved whole, and laid in the courtyard."
"Anyone can see that it is a grave-stone," said the eldest of the
children; "the representation of an hour-glass and part of the figure of an
angel can still be traced, but the inscription beneath is quite worn out,
excepting the name 'Preben,' and a large 'S' close by it, and a little farther
down the name of 'Martha' can be easily read. But nothing more, and even that
cannot be seen unless it has been raining, or when we have washed the stone."
"Dear me! How singular. Why that must be the grave-stone of Preben
Schwane and his wife."
The old man who said this looked old enough to be the grandfather of
all present in the room.
"Yes," he continued, "these people were among the last who were buried
in the churchyard of the old convent. They were a very worthy old couple, I
can remember them well in the days of my boyhood. Everyone knew them, and
they were esteemed by all. They were the oldest residents in the town, and
people said they possessed a ton of gold, yet they were always very plainly
dressed, in the coarsest stuff, but with linen of the purest whiteness.
Preben and Martha were a fine old couple, and when they both sat on the bench,
at the top of the steep stone steps, in front of their house, with the
branches of the linden-tree waving above them, and nodded in a gentle,
friendly way to passers by, it really made one feel quite happy. They were
very good to the poor; they fed them and clothed them, and in their
benevolence there was judgment as well as true Christianity. The old woman
died first; that day is still quite vividly before my eyes. I was a little
boy, and had accompanied my father to the old man's house. Martha had fallen
into the sleep of death just as we arrived there. The corpse lay in a
bedroom, near to the one in which we sat, and the old man was in great
distress and weeping like a child. He spoke to my father, and to a few
neighbors who were there, of how lonely he should feel now she was gone, and
how good and true she, his dead wife, had been during the number of years that
they had passed through life together, and how they had become acquainted, and
learnt to love each other. I was, as I have said, a boy, and only stood by
and listened to what the others said; but it filled me with a strange emotion
to listen to the old man, and to watch how the color rose in his cheeks as he
spoke of the days of their courtship, of how beautiful she was, and how many
little tricks he had been guilty of, that he might meet her. And then he
talked of his wedding-day; and his eyes brightened, and he seemed to be
carried back, by his words, to that joyful time. And yet there she was, lying
in the next room, dead--an old woman, and he was an old man, speaking of the
days of hope, long passed away. Ah, well, so it is; then I was but a child,
and now I am old, as old as Preben Schwane then was. Time passes away, and
all things changed. I can remember quite well the day on which she was
buried, and how Old Preben walked close behind the coffin.
"A few years before this time the old couple had had their grave-stone
prepared, with an inscription and their names, but not the date. In the
evening the stone was taken to the churchyard, and laid on the grave. A year
later it was taken up, that Old Preben might be laid by the side of his wife.
They did not leave behind them wealth, they left behind them far less than
people had believed they possessed; what there was went to families distantly
related to them, of whom, till then, no one had ever heard. The old house,
with its balcony of wickerwork, and the bench at the top of the high steps,
under the lime-tree, was considered, by the road-inspectors, too old and
rotten to be left standing. Afterwards, when the same fate befell the convent
church, and the graveyard was destroyed, the grave-stone of Preben and Martha,
like everything else, was sold to whoever would buy it. And so it happened
that this stone was not cut in two as many others had been, but now lies in the
courtyard below, a scouring block for the maids, and a playground for the
children. The paved street now passes over the resting place of Old Preben
and his wife; no one thinks of them any more now."
And the old man who had spoken of all this shook his head mournfully,
and said, "Forgotten! Ah, yes, everything will be forgotten!" And then the
conversation turned on other matters.
But the youngest child in the room, a boy, with large, earnest eyes,
mounted upon a chair behind the window curtains, and looked out into the yard,
where the moon was pouring a flood of light on the old gravestone--the stone
that had always appeared to him so dull and flat, but which lay there now like
a great leaf out of a book of history. All that the boy had heard of Old
Preben and his wife seemed clearly defined on the stone, and as he gazed on
it, and glanced at the clear, bright moon shining in the pure air, it was as
if the light of God's countenance beamed over His beautiful world.
"Forgotten! Everything will be forgotten!" still echoed through the
room, and in the same moment an invisible spirit whispered to the heart of the
boy, "Preserve carefully the seed that has been entrusted to thee, that it may
grow and thrive. Guard it well. Through thee, my child, shall the
obliterated inscription on the old, weather-beaten grave-stone go forth to
future generations in clear, golden characters. The old pair shall again
wander through the streets arm-in-arm, or sit with their fresh, healthy cheeks
on the bench under the lime-tree, and smile and nod at rich and poor. The
seed of this hour shall ripen in the course of years into a beautiful poem.
The beautiful and the good are never forgotten, they live always in story or
in song."
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Behavior Modification.....806/793-9462 The Dead Zone.............214/522-5321
Demon Roach Underground...806/794-4362 Dragonfire Private........609/424-2606
Question Authority........715/341-6516 Pure Nihilism.............517/337-7319
Tequila Willy's...........209/526-3194 The Metal AE..............201/879-6668
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1988 cDc communications by Krass Katt 12/31/88-99
All Rights Worth Shit