THE LAST CALL

I don't know whether or not the cry "Last call for the dining-car"

affects others as it affects me, but for me it always has a stern,

fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away,

opportunity that can never come again; and, on the occasions when I have

disregarded it, I have been haunted with a sense of the neglected

"might-have-been."

Not, indeed, that the formless regret has been connected with any

illusions as to the mysterious quality of the dinner that I have thus

foregone. I have been well enough aware that the only actual opportunity

thus evaded has been most probably that of an unusually bad dinner,

exorbitantly paid for. The dinner itself has had nothing to do with my

feeling, which, indeed, has come of a suggestiveness in the cry beyond

the occasion, a sense conveyed by the words, in combination with the

swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable swift passage and

gliding away of all things. Ah! so soon it will be the last call--for so

many pleasant things--that we would fain arrest and enjoy a little

longer in a world that with tragic velocity is flowing away from us,

each moment, "like the waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it

will be the "last call" in dead earnest--the last call for the joy of

life and the glory of the world. The grass is already withering, the

flower already fading; and that bird of time, with so short a way to

flutter, is relentlessly on the wing.

Now some natures hear this call from the beginning of their lives. Even

their opulent spendthrift youth is "made the more mindful that the sweet

days die," by every strain of music, by every gathered flower. All their

joy is haunted, like the poetry of William Morris, with the wistful

burden of mortality. Even the summer woodlands, with all their pomp and

riot of exuberant green and gold, are anything but safe from this low

sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty, pressed desperately

close as if to imprison the divine fugitive moment, the song seems to

come nearest. Who has not held some loved face in his hands, and gazed

into it with an almost agonizing effort to realize its reality, to make

eternally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it and the

transfiguring moment for ever, all the time pierced with the melancholy

knowledge that tomorrow all will be as if this had never been, and life

once more its dull disenchanted self?

Too soon shall morning take the stars away,

And all the world be up and open-eyed,

This magic night be turned to common day--

Under the willows on the riverside.

Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the

ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

If one enchanted moment runs to an end, it may be reasonably sure for a

long time yet of many more enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only

taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And, though its poets may

warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously

believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake

is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us

with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has

been robbed of his hoard, that unaccountably the best part of the cake

has been eaten, that perhaps indeed only a few desperate crumbs remain.

A bleak laughter blends now with that once luxurious melancholy. There

is a song at our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephistopheles.

Our blood runs cold. We listen in sudden fear. It is life singing out

its last call.

The time of this call, the occasion and the manner of it, mercifully

vary with individuals. Some fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till

they lie on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted with such a

generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or

they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add

here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way

you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough,

it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake

most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no

hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out

by eating it; and, as I have said, it may be your luck to disprove the

proverb and both eat your cake and have it.

For a dreary majority, however, the cake does come to an end, and for

them henceforth, as Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and

straight and dusty to the grave. For them that last call is apt to come

usually before sunset--and the great American question arises: What are

they going to do about it? That, of course, every one must decide for

himself, according to his inclinations and his opportunities. But a few

general considerations may be of comfort and even of greater value.

There is one thing of importance to know about this last call, that we

are apt to imagine we hear it before we actually do, from a nervous

sense that it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps is growing

grey, and our years beginning to accumulate. We hypnotize ourselves with

our chronology, and say with Emerson:

It is time to grow old,

To take in sail.

Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but may be it isn't, and we

don't. Youth is largely a habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow

ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions and superstitions, both

habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need

never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of

them. I can well conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as

reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the passions with the

advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen."

When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has

retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his

fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him,

but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned

that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison

fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans

and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and

occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some,

hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to

clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing

determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their

efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the

world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of

aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender

sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the

dining-car of life--and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed.

Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various

causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a

numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad

manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private;

and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life

for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather

doesn't get.

A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.

Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's

privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development.

Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear

of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing

in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the

hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain

to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a

ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as

they came along, with Catullus singing their _vivamus atque amemus_, and

practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they

will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past

life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt

sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good

deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to,

it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it

won't be the days when we _didn't_ that we shall recall with a sense of

possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically _did_.

Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland!

Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the

city!

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou

shalt not take,

The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the

nymphs in the brake.

It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of

the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower.

It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The

temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our

middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have

unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest

dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by

"E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave

to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet's volume,

it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who

need its lesson. I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the

length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any

verbal mistakes I make.

"If, on some balmy summer night,

You rowed across the moon path white,

And saw the shining sea grow fair

With silver scales and golden hair,

What would you do?"

"I would be wise

And shut my ears and shut my eyes,

Lest I should leap into the tide

And clasp the seamaid as I died."

"But if you thus were strong to flee

From sweet spells woven of moon and sea,

Are you quite sure that you would reach,

Without one backward look, the beach?"

"I might look back, my dear, and then

Row straight into the snare again,

Or, if I safely got away--

Regret it to my dying day."

He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give

ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted

surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all

it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract

toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready

romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the

_ennui_ of the years. Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the

adventurous, and, as the old song goes:

He either fears his fate too much

Or his deserts are small,

That dares not put it to the touch

To gain or lose it all.

And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a

greater fulness and variety of life. The world is growing kinder toward

the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy

is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies. The

old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives

of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of

curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out

her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness

with the rest. Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many

an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue

Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"--a

favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,--is growing more and more to be the

formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice

is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion

is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all

events, is no longer demanded of us--the wholesale sacrifice of our own

opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a

hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one

of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the

world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the

modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many

"rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy

in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of

nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal

vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us

amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency

of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of

October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach

of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned

moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer

suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we

prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business

but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with

Landor:

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;

It sinks and I am ready to depart.

Such a one will have little need to fear that last call of which I have

been writing. In Kipling's phrase, he has taken his fun where he found

it, and his barns are well stocked with the various harvests of the

years. Not his the wild regret for having "safely got away." Rather he

laughs to remember how often he was taken captive by the enchantments of

the world, how whenever there was any piece of wildness afoot he was

always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount

Cithaeron, and the mad _Evoe! Evoe!_ rang through the moonstruck woods,

be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying

tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies,

the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shrilling up to the stars!

"If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite!" He is no hypocrite, no weary

"king ecclesiast," shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in

which he can no longer share. He frankly acknowledges that then came in

the sweet o' the year, and he is still as young as the youngest by

virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the Dionysiac cup of

life.

At the same time, while he may not ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles

at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of

his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of

its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the

transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards

of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair

women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion

for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a

younger fellow catch the flying maiden, if only you can catch yon

flitting butterfly for your collection. And, strangest of all, your

grand passion for your own remarkable self may suffer a miraculous

transformation into a warm appreciation for other people. It is true

that you may smile a little sadly to find them even more interesting

than yourself. But such passing sadness has the relish of salvation in

it. Self is a weary throne, and the abdication of the ego is to be free

of one of the burdens rather than the pleasures of existence.

But, to conclude, it is all too possible that you who read this may have

no such assets of a wilful well spent life to draw on as he whom I have

pictured. It may be that you have starved your emotions and fled your

opportunities, or you may simply have had bad luck. The golden moments

seldom came your way. The wilderness of life has seldom blossomed with a

rose. "The breast of the nymph in the brake" and "the chimes at

midnight" were not for you. And there is a menacing murmur of autumn in

the air. The days are shortening, and the twilight comes early, with a

chilly breath. The crickets have stopped singing, and the garden is sad

with elegiac blooms. The chrysanthemum is growing on the grave of the

rose. Perhaps already it is too late--too late for life and joy. You

must take to first editions and entomology and other people's interests

in good earnest. But no! Suddenly on the wind there comes a cry--a sound

of cymbals and flutes and dancing feet. It is life's last call. You have

one chance left. There is still Indian summer. It is better than

nothing. Hurry and join the music, ere it be too late. For this is the

last call!

When time lets slip a little perfect hour,

Take it, for it will not come again.