Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 13

It is everywhere the custom, in life, in literature, to celebrate the young girl; to praise her pink cheeks, her shining hair, her innocence, her gayeties--her muslins, even, and blue ribbons. She has become in these latter days a proverb, a type--_la jeune fille_. Yet, to the discreet observer how gaudy is her charm, how showy and unsubstantial, and of the day only, when matched with graces like those of the truly incomparable old lady! It is an antique convention that hurries off old age with decrepitude and care and quavering palsy. And it may be that the old gentleman is unamiable; that, his days of strenuousness fairly over, he becomes crabbed, a lover of snuff, and unpoetical. But the old lady is a creature of another quality. The refinements of age only enhance the femininity of her charm; to her, whimsicalities, delicate occupations, the fine lines that etch themselves expressively across her brow and about her mouth, are all vastly becoming. With what ineffable grace, moreover, she p.r.o.nounces certain words in the elegant fashion of an age ago! How softly the old Indian shawls she wears fall about her shoulders! What strange, unlikely stories she tells of the beginning of the century!

I am indeed no novice to her charms. I have been victim to the enchantments of a long line of old ladies from my earliest years upward.

When my frocks were still short and I still suffered under the ignominy of pinafores, I remember very well following a friend of my grandmother's about, and fetching big books for her. She was an exceedingly learned old lady, I take it; indeed, my grandmother always spoke of her as strong-minded, wherefore I am sometimes led to doubt whether she would so unreservedly have pleased my maturer taste. But in those early days my devotion impelled me even to the point of learning the alphabets of the curious languages she read. What const.i.tuted her peculiar, her romantic charm, however, was the fact that she had traveled in many far-away countries. I always understood it was their strange suns that had turned her skin the yellow color of old parchment, and stopped the whitening of her hair at a grizzly gray. This particular ugly gray I admired along with the rest: it suggested worldly sophistication and a cosmopolitan experience, as did no less her deep voice and blue-veined hands, and her habit of taking a vigorous walk in the morning, before breakfast. Her daughter, she told me, was named Aurore. How I wished that I myself had been favored with such a name!

My grandmother was very different--much prettier and gentler, no doubt; but her daughters bore such stiff, old-fashioned names as Anne and Emeline, and she herself had seldom left New England, and took only a short walk in the sun at noonday, under a tiny black silk parasol. At other times she sat beside her work-table, which had legs of twisted mahogany, and a crimson silk bag hanging down from the middle in a way I never understood. Out of this she occasionally brought sc.r.a.ps of faded old brocades,--pink and green they would be, with a rare yellow, or a blue still a little gay; and now and then, when the winter evenings until my bedtime were long, she even found bright-colored beads in a small drawer at the side. Although she had been 'a proficient' in music as a girl, I think she knew no language save English. Emerson she read chiefly; the prayers of Theodore Parker; black volumes of sermons by William Ellery Channing; and sometimes, to me, in a very soft voice, Whittier's poems. In the late afternoons she was accustomed to play at solitaire, letting me sit at a corner of the table to look on. Not infrequently, when excited by the odds against which we were fighting, I forgot to hold up my head, and my long brown curls, falling down among the cards, threw them into disarray, and obliged me to sit at a penitential distance. My grandmother did not choose to be interrupted.

But all the games in turn she invariably won by a deft rearrangement of the cards when she saw them going wrong. 'With one's self, you know, my dear,' she would say, judiciously distributing diamonds among the spades,--'with one's self it is quite understood.'

Since the days of my grandmother and her friends I have known a hundred other old ladies, if none more charming. There are, I dare say, persons who, in going about the world, meet people of other sorts: actors, perhaps, or ladies of fashion, or diplomatists,--first of all, I fancy, to be desired,--or spiritualists, or musicians. Personally, I never fall in with any one except old ladies. In a railway train, for example, I am sure to find myself opposite or beside one, and of late years they have generally had birds with them.

The first I remember--with a bird, that is--was in a German railway carriage going from Berlin to Hanover. At least, my destination was Hanover; the old lady herself was on her way home to Dusseldorf. She had been visiting her nephews and nieces in Berlin; she had a great many of them, she told me. From her fingers, covered with old pearl and diamond rings, I gathered that she was very rich; and from the bouquets of many colors, ranged in the luggage-rack above her head, that the nephews and nieces were trying to persuade her to leave them her fortune. She wore, nevertheless, an air of extreme detachment, holding her long netted silk purse--through whose meshes the Prussian gold gleamed--tightly clasped between two fat fingers. Altogether she was a very portly and regal-looking person, and gave you the impression of being dressed in black velvet, though in point of fact I do not think that she was. But her mantle was fringed heavily several times about, and her hat--for she wore a hat with a brim that dropped slightly, discreetly, all around--was also bordered by a black fringe that just cleared her faded eyebrows and her black beady eyes. She had a gouty foot, too,--she was quite complete,--that rested on a little folding stool she had brought with her; and she rang imperiously for the guard. When he came she ordered coffee, bullying the cream-faced Teuton into bringing a double portion of sugar to feed her bird, a little green creature, disposed among the flowers above her head. It was with a good deal of difficulty that she struggled up to reach him, but to have him handed down would, she said, excite him unnecessarily. 'Mein Mannchen, mein Mannchen,' she murmured in a deep, tender tone, as she fed him each successive crumb.

After feasting the bird she turned her attention to me, and asking to see the book that I was absorbed in, she kept it until we arrived at Hanover. I had evidently read too much in trains, she remarked, alluding to my eye-gla.s.ses. Americans, she knew, were very foolish. Then she asked me the price of everything in the States, and of my traveling bag in particular, and quarreled with me as to the number of marks in a dollar. 'You'll find that I am right,' she a.s.sured me, as I was squeezing myself and the brown leather bag she admired out of the narrow door of the German coupe. 'You'll find there are six marks in every dollar. Auf wiedersehen, Fraulein.'

The last of my old ladies with birds I met only a month or two ago, on the way from London down to Southsea,--the one place in all the world, I suppose, whither a thin spinster, accompanied by a ragged-tailed bird named Tip, should be traveling. She was, of course, very different from the German dowager; not so far on in years, and, as I indicated, exaggeratedly thin; shy, furthermore, and dressed in a worn black-silk gown, with a lace collar at her throat drawn together by a hair brooch.

And she spoke only from time to time, to inquire if we must change carriages at Woking; meanwhile looking a little greedily from Tip to the seedcakes in the hands of three English schoolgirls, who, with shortish frocks and longish hair hanging over their shoulders, sat in a row on my side of the carriage, and scattered crumbs enough to have fattened a family of partridges.

Old ladies at sea, though there without the embellishments of flowers and birds, I have found no less attractive than on land. I fell in with a party of them in the early summer, on their way to Carlsbad to drink the waters; with the exception, that is, of two or three whose destination was Kissingen, and who disbelieved altogether, I learned when we were a few days out from New York, in the rheumatism of the Carlsbad-bound ladies. Carlsbad, they a.s.sured me,--punctuating their remarks with sniffs of their smelling-bottles as I tucked cushions behind their poor backs,--Carlsbad was all fine clothes and frivolity and band music (than which surely nothing has a more wicked sound), and was by no means the place a person really ill would dream of retiring to for her health's sake.

But it matters very little whether I travel in trains or in ships, or whether I rest quietly at home, my companions are rarely of my own age.

If I am asked out to luncheon to meet the wife of a melancholy doubtful poet who died young, and on my way to the house in question dwell, not unnaturally, on her youthful tragic grief, on my arrival I find myself confronted by a fat, kindly old lady, crowned with a large black-beaded bonnet that shows a bunch of purple flowers above either ear. If I go to visit some beautiful house secluded in the country, it is an old lady who stands on the threshold. I remember such a mansion, built in Tudor times, and topped with chimneys calculated to make you sigh your soul away in longing; it had once been the dower house of an English queen, and in front of it two peac.o.c.ks paraded proudly all day long. Others, I knew, went to admire it, and were entertained by the granddaughter, or at least by the middle-aged daughter, of its mistress. Not so on the sunny morning of my visit. Lady W---- herself was working among the flowers in her garden, and herself showed me back to the cascade and the tulip tree, stepping over the lawn with the spirit of a girl, and apologizing with a girl's vanity, too, for her garden hat and gloves.

She was the very flower and mirror of all the old ladies I have ever known; conscious, if you will, of her charm, and all the more charming for that. She led me into the drawing room--she knew she held my heart in her hand--to see her portrait, which, though painted by a celebrated artist, made her look very like any other old lady in velvet and a bonnet and furs. Her great gayety, her beautiful eyes, the sweet curving lines about her mouth, were all forgotten. 'I don't know,' she said to me a little stiffly, as she paused before it, and for a moment glanced across to her maternal grandmother done by Reynolds, with pink cheeks, and with a pink rose in her hand instead of a m.u.f.f, 'I don't know, my dear, whether it is like or not, but certainly it is a very odd picture.'

More delightful though each one be than the last, it is but reasonable that the wealth of my experience among old ladies should have led me to certain discriminations. Old ladies, I am prepared to say, divide themselves into two cla.s.ses: the thin, namely, and the fat. Nor is this discrimination so artificial as it may appear. Another equally expressive, equally conclusive, could not be made. And of the two--but this is a matter of prejudice--I prefer the thin, as having commonly more wit, more liveliness, brighter eyes, and a taste for anecdote generally wanting, I think it only right to say, in the fatter, kindlier cla.s.s. My point of view is possibly ultra-modern, but what will you? _La grande dame_, so called, vanished with the days and ideals of Louis XIV.

At the end of two centuries or so she is rarely to be met with. I have known her only once in all her traditional fairness, but then she was of the essence of perfection. She gave one the impression of having never for a moment been out of the great world; of having lived, though in New York, perpetually with princes--'_les princes du sang, les princes etrangers, les grands-seigneurs facon de princes_.' But what is my ungraceful pen that it should hazard a description of her, or attempt the splendor of her white hair and her white hands! Her graciousness, her elegance, her worldliness, are not to be compa.s.sed by a sentence.

Among modern old ladies, of whom I speak somewhat less diffidently, I affect the more frivolous sort. My own feeling is, very strictly, that in old age the world of affairs should be left behind, and one's hours pa.s.sed pleasantly among pleasant things. Age should be impulsive, light-hearted--brilliant, if you will; it should fill its days with flowers and music and embroidery; it should drive in low carriages behind plump ponies; it should write a pretty, pointed, epistolary hand, and read nothing heavier than memoirs. Intellectuality may be all very well in youth, but in an old lady anything beyond a delicate pedantry is unlovely. I like old ladies with decided opinions, with a gift for repartee and some skill in the pa.s.sions. Curiosities, strange modesties,--I knew of an old lady who brought her grandsons up never to look into a butcher's shop, deeming it indecorous, even indecent,--fantastic economies, eccentricities of various sorts, are delightful. And of all these things the insipidity and jejuneness of youth perforce know nothing. The very pattern of young girls is bound by a strait-lacing conventionality. Formalities, anxieties, uncertainties, sit upon her sleeve. She has no alternative, innocent creature, save to order her days and lay her plans in behalf of a charming old ladyhood.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

A Memory of Old Gentlemen

By Sharlot M. Hall

I have always shared the preference of the poet Swinburne for very old people and very little children, and, as it has happened, nearly all of my old people have been of that s.e.x to which Shakespeare refers as coming eventually to the 'lean and slippered pantaloon.'

It began when I was a particularly roly-poly little girl of four, with brown braids carried through the back of my sunbonnet and tied fast in its strings, that the unwelcome shadow of that blue gingham might never be absent.

In compensation, I suppose, there was an equally roly-poly old gentleman who used to toss me up in the long swing under the big oak trees, singing in rhythm to my swaying self the chorus of a then popular song:--

Swinging in the lane; swinging in the lane; Sweetest girl I ever met was swinging in the lane.

The great, bending branches spread a canopy befitting a Druid temple, and the new little leaves, like crumpled bronze velvet, brushed my face as I held fast to the ropes, all a-tremble with the spirit of adventure and a little fear that the earth was so very far away, and was tossed up till I could peep into the nest out of which my pet blue jay had tumbled a week before. One of his brothers sat, a disconsolate fluff of faded blue feathers, on the edge of the nest, and the parent birds squalled noisy protest at the st.u.r.dy, red-stockinged legs invading their domestic privacy.

The oaks and the swing and the old gentleman were the first milestones on my way to Grown-Up Land. When my round fat arm had no longer to reach straight up to clasp my pudgy fingers around the thumb of my friend; when after many trials I caught the ropes and lifted myself without help to the wide board swing-seat; then I was truly 'big,' and trotted off to demand that a new mark should take the place of the one that had lately shown my height on the smooth gray trunk of my favorite tree. Smooth, for those wonderful oaks, centuries old, and each many feet in girth, had been repeatedly stripped of their bark as high as a man could reach; and now, as if tired of renewing the ever stolen coat, contented themselves with a thin, scarlike covering. Since their sapling days, perhaps, slender, conical tepees of buffalo skins had nestled in their shade, and number-less brown babies had swung 'Rock-a-bye baby in a tree-top' from their limbs.

There was a broad hearth of stones between the spreading roots of one where buffalo steaks had been broiled, and where other children had roasted the plump ripe acorns as I was fond of doing.

The buffalo robes for the tepees and deerskins for the gayly wrought moccasins had been tanned with the bark stripped from those very trees under which I played and swung. In the little grove behind my beloved trees, and bordered by the tiny creek where I waded and fished with a bent pin for small flat sunfish as bright as living sunbeams, were bare poles still standing in a circle, lashed together at their tops with strips of bark or thongs of raw-hide.

There were wild cherries in the grove, good in blossom and better in fruit, puckery-sweet wild plums, and a great black-walnut tree dear to myself and the squirrels; and here the spirit of adventure thrilled me again, for my fancy saw dusky faces behind every bush, and the feathery cherry blossoms were always nodding eagle feathers on the head of the warrior just waiting to seize me.

A good deal of this was due to my old friend who had just come from the East, a far-away, mysterious Somewhere to me, and who, I am inclined to think, secretly shared my dread of these brown people in whose home we were interlopers. But some of it came from the tales to which I listened after I was tucked away in my trundle-bed on winter nights, and the men gathered around the fire to talk of Indian raids and hunting and trapping adventures.

Not a few of my old gentlemen at this time were gray-bearded scouts and hunters, with great caps of fur and long rifles that seemed to tower above my head as far as the oaks. Children were rare novelties to those men of the plains, and I was pa.s.sed from shoulder to shoulder, delighted with tales of bear and buffalo, and fingering with awed hands the beaded shot-pouches and belts of embroidered buckskin, but feeling all the while almost as far above earth as when I swung over the blue jay's nest. Then we moved away, and my next old gentleman was the very ant.i.thesis of the first. Small and thin and morose, with a bitterness that almost hid the sadness in his face. A misanthrope, a miser, an atheist, said his neighbors; but, in truth, only a man over whom hung the shadow of a tragedy that had darkened his life. Sometimes for days his mind 'traveled a crooked road,' as he said, and then he would wander alone in the hills, or shut himself up with his books; and no smoke came out of the chimney, and no answer was given to curious people who knocked at the door. Most children feared him, but I did not; that and my love of books made the bond between us. He lent me quaint old histories and philosophies, full of big words that sounded very fine as he rolled them off in a sonorous voice. I learned to know Swedenborg from Kant, and Kant from Comte, and was in a fair way to become a philosopher myself when again we moved--so far that we both knew the parting was final.

With fingers still pudgy I crocheted him a pair of marvelous green 'wristers' as a farewell gift, and he brought me a thick red volume, De Foe's _History of the Devil_, with pictures that made my brown braids rise up visibly every time I looked at them, and a single German silver teaspoon, which he said was to form the nucleus of my wedding silver.

Years later some book thief of abnormal tastes robbed me of the treasured De Foe, but the spoon still reposes in solitary state, untroubled by additions, and most unlikely ever to serve the end for which my old friend designed it.

My last word of him was in an ill-scrawled, childish letter from a schoolmate: 'Mr. Cushion is dead; the doctor gave him some medicine and he died.' I was old enough to have a certain gladness mingle with my regret. The shadow was lifted; there were no more crooked roads to travel; my old friend was at rest.

It was my next old gentleman who introduced me to Shakespeare and the 'lean and slippered pantaloon.' A wicked sense of the appropriateness of the quotation flashed into my mind as he read it; I wondered, in fact, if the Bard of Avon had been shuffling around in dressing-gown and carpet slippers when it was written. Yet this untidy old man, who loved Shakespeare, reveled in Sh.e.l.ley, and wrote heroic verse and Greek dramas by the sackful, had, they told me, been a brilliant soldier, the pick and pride of his regiment, the model in dress and deportment of all the fresh recruits. Surely the irony of fate is something more than rhetoric.

If he wrote in lighter vein, he had lived in tragedy; between The Skylark and Under the Greenwood Tree we had glimpses of b.l.o.o.d.y battlefield, of disease-reeking, famine-scourged Southern prisons, of narrow escapes, and men hunted like wild beasts.

Very proud was my old friend when my own blundering thoughts first shaped themselves in verse; I doubt if Hamlet on his first appearance received such an ovation. And then one night the sacks of ma.n.u.script were packed, the little trunk strapped, and the daylight train bore away, we never knew whither, one who left word to no one, but three books--the battered Shakespeare, Sh.e.l.ley minus his cover, and a first edition of Whittier--to a little girl.

No word has come out of the silence, but when I am making air castles I like to think that some summer night I shall visit the Parthenon and find my old friend writing Greek dramas in the moonlight.

After that my old gentlemen began to come in pairs and trios, so that they seldom threw such a clearly focused memory. The one whom I loved best was not really the best known; we were both too shy to realize in time how much we might have been to each other. He was a gentle, quiet, courtly man; I remember that I always involuntarily looked for the pages holding up my court train of velvet and ermine when he bowed to me: a scholarly man, whom one would have taken for some gifted professor or polished diplomat: and he was in fact an Indian scout, known the length of the West for his courage and fidelity and unshakable honor. He would have stood with his life to a promise given the blackest renegade that ever harried his trail.

I knew in a vague way that his was a name in history; but we were always too busy with Sir Edwin Arnold and the Vedas and Mahatmas to talk of that. I can see him now throwing back the silver hair from a face as fine as some old marble Jove, and repeating the Sanskrit tales or the lines he loved best:--

'Such as thou shalt see not self-subduing do no deed of good, In youth or age, in household or in wood: It needs not man should pa.s.s by th' Orders Four To come to Virtue; doing right is more Than to be twice born: therefore wise men say Easy and excellent is Virtue's way.'

Fit words for him who subdued himself with such gentle patience to years of blindness; never saying 'Is the sun shining?' but 'How beautiful the hills are in the sunshine!' It was always daylight in his soul, till he slept at last in the sunniest corner of his beloved hills.

There are many dear old gentlemen still; indeed, now that I think of it, I have known but one young man at all intimately, and him I have not met face to face. Homer and Odysseus have been such satisfying friends to me that I have not missed Paris and Adonis. The flavor of old wine has been too long on my lips for me to change now, and I shall be well content to have it said of me at last: 'Here lieth one who had the friendship of old men and little children's love.'

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Viola's Lovers

A Study in the New Morality

By Richard Bowland Kimball

I sometimes think that our relations with our children, or our pets, are successful because we expect nothing in return. Yet, after all, the relations are reciprocal; and I have been thinking today of some of the things I have got from an old dog who has been in our family for years and years. I have learned several spiritual truths from her, and I have learned them more thoroughly, perhaps, because she never had the slightest idea that she was teaching me anything. Dogs, of course, show various characteristics--some are sn.o.bs, others take naturally to a low life, others again are aristocratic and reticent and self-controlled; but I have never known a dog yet that you could describe as exactly a moralist.

Viola came to us out of the primeval woods with an effect of apparitional beauty. Rather a poetic name for a dog, perhaps; but there was such a union of grace and timidity, such a charm of silken draperies and russet ruff and tail almost sweeping the ground, that we were irresistibly reminded of a Viola we had seen recently. It was as if the dog said mutely, 'What should I do in Illyria?'