Page:In Lockerbie Street.djvu/31

 making up, with a happy-not-ever-after, but for three months longerand then the end.

So it seems that Mr. Riley used to go to church when there was a girl to go after. He doesn't go much now. A neighbor in Lockerbie Street often says, "You ought to. Come, go with us to-day." But he will only promise, "Maybe, some time."

"I don't go to church only when I have to," he says. "I can't bear the awe and gloom. I don't like worship that way. It ought to be cheerful and joyful. I don't believe God likes Christians with long faces in an attitude of abnegation. I'd kick any one sky high I'd see do that to me, and God must want to.

"It just sort o' clabbers my mind to go to church. It's the groups of people gathering hushed and still. Swish, swish, Sunday silks coming down the aisle. The odor of black crêpe and the silence in which somebody'll hear your collar creak if you turn your head. Then there's the boom, boom of the bell. And it all brings back the gray day you came here before to put away a loved one; the procession of black carriages, the bleak windit's the heartbreak of life here in the house of worship. No, sir, I don't go to church when I don't have to."

As he stops talking the room grows still. He is looking off toward Greenfield. And he sees a long country road bordered with thirty-one poplar trees in a row. Their silvery leaves rustle and whisper sorrowfully. And at the end of the long road is a gateway with gilt letters, "The Park Cemetery." Then through the gateway, over down by the edge of the cornfield, there is a granite stone that guards four graves, and on it is written: "God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain."

If anybody thinks because Mr. Riley doesn't go to church he hasn't got religion, just look in his verses and you will find it. If he ever does run short personally, it's only because he's put so much of his supply into his poetry. There's one poem prayer, if he never prayed another, would just about open the gates of heaven. When he walks among the flowers, too, he looks at them with long, long looks filled with a poet's reverent adoration