“Isn’t there a legend,” he wanted to know, “or if there isn’t one there
ought to be one, that the first flowers were Christmas roses and that
you can detect their odour in all other flowers? I’m not sure,” he
warmed to the subject, “but that they say if you look steadily, with
clear eyes, you can see all about every flower many little lines, in
the shape of a Christmas rose!”
Of course nothing beautiful is difficult to believe. Even in the
windows of the great florists, where the dear flowers pose as if for
their portraits, we think that one looking closely through the glass
may see in their faces the spirit of the Christmas roses. And when the
flowers are made a gift of love the spirit is set free. Who knows?
Perhaps the gracious little spirit is in us all, waiting for its
liberty in our best gifts.
And at thought of gifts I said, on Christmas eve of all times, what had
been for some time in my heart:--
“Pelleas, we ought--we really ought, you know, to make a new will.”
The word casts a veritable shadow on the page as I write it. Pelleas,
conscious of the same shadow, moved and frowned.
“But why, Etarre?” he asked; “I had an uncle who lived to be ninety.”
“So will you,” I said, “and still--”
“He began translating Theocritus at ninety,” Pelleas continued
convincingly.
“I’ll venture he had made his will by then, though,” said I.
“Is that any reason why I should make mine?” Pelleas demanded. “I
_never_ did the things my family did.”
“Like living until ninety?” I murmured.
O, I could not love Pelleas if he was never unreasonable. It seems to
me that the privilege of unreason is one of the gifts of marriage; and
when I hear The Married chiding each other for the exercise of this
gift I long to cry: Is it not tiresome enough in all conscience to have
to keep up a brave show of reason for one’s friends, without wearing a
uniform of logic in private? Laugh at each other’s unreason for your
pastime, and Heaven bless you.
Pelleas can do more than this: He can laugh at his own unreason. And
when he had done so:--
“Ah, well, I know we ought,” he admitted, “but I do so object to the
literary style of wills.”
It has long been a sadness of ours that the law makes all the poor
dead talk alike in this last office of the human pleasure, so that
cartman and potentate and philosopher give away their chattels to the
same dreary choice of forms. No matter with what charming propriety
they have in life written little letters to accompany gifts, most
sensitively shading the temper of bestowal, yet in the majesty of their
passing they are forced into a very strait-jacket of phrasing so that
verily, to bequeath a thing to one’s friend is well-nigh to throw it at
him. Yes, one of the drawbacks to dying is the diction of wills.
Pelleas meditated for a moment and then laughed out.
“Telegrams,” said he, “are such a social convenience in life that I
don’t see why they don’t extend their function. Then all we should need
would be two witnesses, ready for anything, and some yellow telegraph
blanks, and a lawyer to file the messages whenever we should die,
telling all our friends what we wish them to have.”
At once we fell planning the telegrams, quite as if the Eye of the Law
knew what it is to wrinkle at the corners.
As,
Mrs. Lawrence Knight,
Little Rosemont,
L.I.
I wish you to have my mother’s pearls and her mahogany and my
Samarcand rug and my Langhorne Plutarch and a kiss.
Aunt Etarre.
and