Threads of Grey and Gold Part 12

Indeed, the President might well think the universe had gone suddenly wrong if the postman pa.s.sed him by, but there are compensations in everything. The First Gentleman of the Republic must inevitably miss the pleasant emotions which letters bring to the most of us.

The clerks and carriers in the business centres may be pardoned if they lose sight of the potentialities of the letters that pa.s.s through their hands. When a skysc.r.a.per is a postal district in itself, there is no time for the man in grey to think of the burden he carries, save as so many pounds of dead weight, becoming appreciably lighter at each stop. But outside the hum and bustle, on quiet streets and secluded by-ways, there are faces at the windows, watching eagerly for the mail.

The progress of the postman is akin to a Roman triumph, for in his leathern pack lies Fate. Long experience has given him a sixth sense, as if the letters breathed a hint of their contents through their superscriptions.

The business letter, crisp and to the point, has an atmosphere of its own, even where cross lines of typewriting do not show through the envelope.

The long, rambling, friendly hand is distinctive, and if it has been carried in the pocket a long time before mailing, the postman knows that the writer is a married woman with a foolish trust in her husband.

Circulars addressed mechanically, at so much a thousand, never deceive the postman, though the recipient often opens them with pleasurable sensations, which immediately sink to zero. And the love-letters! The carrier is a veritable Sherlock Holmes when it comes to them.

Gradually he becomes acquainted with the inmost secrets of those upon his route. Friendship, love, and marriage, absence and return, death, and one's financial condition, are all as an open book to the man in grey. Invitations, cards, wedding announcements, forlorn little letters from those to whom writing is not as easy as speech, childish epistles with sc.r.a.p pictures pasted on the outside, all give an inkling of their contents to the man who delivers them.

When the same bill comes to the same house for a long and regular period, then ceases, even the carrier must feel relieved to know that it has been paid. When he isn't too busy, he takes a friendly look at the postal cards, and sometimes saves a tenant in a third flat the weariness of two flights of stairs by shouting the news up the tube!

If the dweller in a tenement has ingratiating manners, he may learn how many papers, and letters are being stuffed into the letter-box, by a polite inquiry down the tube when the bell rings. Through the subtle freemasonry of the postman's voice a girl knows that her lover has not forgotten her--and her credit is good for the "two cents due" if the tender missive is overweight.

"All the world loves a lover," and even the busy postman takes a fatherly interest in the havoc wrought by Cupid along his route. The little blind G.o.d knows neither times nor seasons--all alike are his own--but the man in grey, old and spectacled though he may be, is his confidential messenger.

Love-letters are seemingly immortal. A clay tablet on which one of the Pharaohs wrote, asking for the heart and hand of a beautiful foreign princess, is now in the British Museum. But suppose the postman had not been sure-footed, and all the clay letters had been smashed into fragments in a single grand catastrophe! What a stir in high places, what havoc in Church and State, and how many fond hearts broken, if the postman had fallen down!

"Nothing feeds the flame like a letter," said Emerson; "it has intent, personality, secrecy." Flimsy and frail as it is, so easily torn or destroyed, the love-letter many times outlasts the love. Even the Father of his Country, though he has been dead this hundred years or more, has left behind him a love-letter, ragged and faded, but still legible, beginning: "My Dearest Life and Love."

"Matter is indestructible," so the scientists say, but what of the love-letter that is reduced to ashes? Does its pa.s.sion live again in some far-off violet flame, or, rising from its dust, bloom once more in a fragrant rose, to touch the lips of another love?

In countless secret places, the tender missives are hidden, for the lover must always keep his joy in tangible form, to be sure that it was not a dream. They fly through the world by day and night, like white-winged birds that can say, "I love you"--over mountain, hill, stream, and plain; past sea and lake and river, through the desert's fiery heat and amid the throbbing pulses of civilisation, with never a mistake, to bring exquisite rapture to another heart and wings of light to the loved one's soul.

Under the pillow of the maiden, her lover's letter brings visions of happiness too great for the human heart to hold. Even in her dreams, her fingers tighten upon his letter--the visible a.s.surance of his unchanging and unchangeable love.

When the bugle sounds the charge, and dimly through the flash and flame the flag signals "Follow!" many a heart, leaping to answer with the hot blood of youth, finds a sudden tenderness in the midst of its high courage, from the loving letter which lies close to the soldier's breast.

Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, Moscow and the Wilderness, Waterloo, Mafeking, and San Juan--the old blood-stained fields and the modern scenes of terror have all alike known the same message and the same thrill. The faith and hope of the living, the kiss and prayer of the dying, the cries of the wounded, and the hot tears of those who have parted forever, are on the blood-stained pages of the love-letters that have gone to war.

"_Ich liebe Dich_," "_Je t'aime_," or, in our dear English speech, "I love you,"--it is all the same, for the heart knows the universal language, the words of which are gold, bedewed with tears that shine like precious stones.

Every attic counts old love-letters among its treasures, and when the rain beats on the roof and grey swirls of water are blown against the pane, one may sit among the old trunks and boxes and bring to light the loves of days gone by.

The little hair-cloth trunk, with its rusty lock and broken hinges, brings to mind a rosy-cheeked girl in a poke bonnet, who went a-visiting in the stage-coach. Inside is the bonnet itself--white, with a gorgeous tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of pink "lute-string" ribbon, which has faded into ashes of roses at the touch of the kindly years.

From the trunk comes a musty fragrance--lavender, sweet clover, rosemary, thyme, and the dried petals of roses that have long since crumbled to dust. Sc.r.a.ps of brocade and taffeta, yellowed lingerie, and a quaint old wedding gown, daguerreotypes in ornate cases, and then the letters, tied with faded ribbon, in a package by themselves.

The fingers unconsciously soften to their task, for the letters are old and yellow, and the ink has faded to brown. Every one was cut open with the scissors, not hastily torn according to our modern fashion, but in a slow and seemly manner, as befits a solemn occasion.

Perhaps the sweet face of a great-grandmother grew much perplexed at the sight of a letter in an unfamiliar hand, and perhaps, too, as is the way of womankind, she studied the outside a long time before she opened it. As the months pa.s.sed by, the handwriting became familiar, but a coquettish grandmother may have flirted a bit with the letter, and put it aside--until she could be alone.

All the important letters are in the package, from the first formal note asking permission to call, which a womanly instinct bade the maiden put aside, to the last letter, written when twilight lay upon the long road they had travelled together, but still beginning: "My Dear and Honoured Wife."

Bits of rosemary and geranium, lemon verbena, tuberose, and heliotrope, fragile and whitened, but still sweet, fall from the opened letters and rustle softly as they fall.

Far away in the "peace which pa.s.seth all understanding," the writer of the letters sleeps, but the old love keeps a fragrance that outlives the heart in which it bloomed.

At night, when the fires below are lighted, and childish voices make the old house ring with laughter, Memory steals into the attic to sing softly of the past, as a mother croons her child to sleep.

Rocking in a quaint old attic chair, with the dear familiar things of home gathered all about her, Memory's voice is sweet, like a harp tuned in the minor mode when the south wind sweeps the strings.

Bunches of herbs swing from the rafters and fill the room with the wholesome scent of an old-fashioned garden, where rue and heartsease grew. With the fragrance comes the breath from that garden of Mnemosyne, where the simples for heartache nod beside the River of Forgetfulness.

In a flash the world is forgotten, and into the attic come dear faces from that distant land of childhood, where a strange enchantment glorified the commonplace, and made the dreams of night seem real.

Footsteps that have long been silent are heard upon the attic floor, and voices, hushed for years, whisper from the shadows from the other end of the room.

A moonbeam creeps into the attic and transfigures the haunted chamber with a sheen of silver mist. From the spinning-wheel come a soft hum and a delicate whir; then a long-lost voice breathes the first notes of an old, old song. The melody changes to a minuet, and the lady in the portrait moves, smiling, from the tarnished gilt frame that surrounds her--then a childish voice says: "Mother, are you asleep?"

Down the street the postman pa.s.ses, bearing his burden of joy and pain: letters from far-off islands, where the Stars and Stripes gleam against a forest of palms; from the snow-bound fastnesses of the North, where men are searching for gold; from rose-scented valleys and violet fields, where the sun forever shines, and from lands across the sea, where men speak an alien tongue--single messages from one to another; letters that plead for pardon cross the paths of those that are meant to stab; letters written in jest too often find grim earnest at the end of their journey, and letters written in all tenderness meet misunderstandings and pain, when the postman brings them home; letters that deal with affairs of state and shape the destiny of a nation; tidings of happiness and sorrow, birth and death, love and trust, and the thousand pangs of trust betrayed; an hundred joys and as many griefs are all in the postman's hands.

No wonder, then, that there is a stir in the house, that eyes brighten, hearts beat quickly, and eager steps hasten to the door of destiny, when the postman rings the bell!

A Summer Reverie

I sit on the sh.o.r.e of the deep blue sea As the tide comes rolling in, And wonder, as roaming in sunlit dreams, The cause of the breakers' din.

For each of the foam-crowned billows Has a wonderful story to tell, And the surge's mystical music Seems wrought by a fairy spell.

I wander through memory's portals, Through mansions dim and vast, And gaze at the beautiful pictures That hang in the halls of the past.

And dream-faces gather around me, With voices soft and low, To draw me back to the pleasures Of the lands of long ago.

There are visions of beauty and splendour, And a fame that I never can win-- Far out on the deep they are sailing-- My ships that will never come in.

A Vignette

It was a muddy down-town corner and several people stood in the cold, waiting for a street-car. A stand of daily papers was on the sidewalk, guarded by two little newsboys. One was much younger than the other, and he rolled two marbles back and forth in the mud by the curb.

Suddenly his attention was attracted by something bright above him, and he looked up into a bunch of red carnations a young lady held in her hands. He watched them eagerly, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the feast of colour. She saw the hungry look in the little face, and put one into his hand. He was silent, until his brother said: "Say thanky to the lady." He whispered his thanks, and then she bent down and pinned the blossom upon his ragged jacket, while the big policeman on the corner smiled approvingly.

"My, but you're gay now, and you can sell all your papers," the bigger boy said tenderly.

"Yep, I can sell 'em now, sure!"

Out of the crowd on the opposite corner came a tiny, dark-skinned Italian girl, with an accordion slung over her shoulder by a dirty ribbon; she made straight for the carnations and fearlessly cried, "Lady, please give me a flower!" She got one, and quickly vanished in the crowd.

The young woman walked up the street to a flower-stand to replenish her bunch of carnations, and when she returned, another dark-skinned mite rushed up to her without a word, only holding up grimy hands with a gesture of pathetic appeal. Another brilliant blossom went to her, and the young woman turned to follow her; on through the crowd the child fled, until she reached the corner where her mother stood, seamed and wrinkled and old, with the dark pathetic eyes of sunny Italy. She held the flower out to her, and the weary mother turned and s.n.a.t.c.hed it eagerly, then pressed it to her lips, and kissed it as pa.s.sionately as if it had been the child who brought it to her.