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 classes: 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
class. 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 compassed 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
passed 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 passions. 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.
[Illustration]
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 sex 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 sturdy, 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 passed 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
antithesis 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 Shelley, 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 bloody
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 manuscript
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, Shelley 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 pass 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.'
[Illustration]
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 snobs, 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?'
She had evidently been through a terrible experience. A broken rope was
around her neck; she was as gaunt as a wolf; her eyes were almost
iridescent with terror, like the wonderful eyes of some hysteriacs.
Imprison her soft hand and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes!
We did not adopt Viola; she adopted us. She followed us to the tent
where we were spending the summer, and there she stayed with us, to
remain on guard when we were away, to welcome us on our return with such
a show of abject gratitude. I think a male dog could not have shown such
a union of love and fear; her spirit had evidently been broken; it
became our task to lure her confidence back again--and here began my own
education. If I spoke with--well, decision to my wife, poor Viola slunk
to the ground. She thought the tone was meant for her. I would never
claim to be a model husband, but I did learn from Viola, theoretically
at least, that one can have good manners even in the privacy of the
family circle.
More rapidly than we could have expected Viola's terrors left her, and
she resumed the normal canine outlook on life-like humans I have known
who have managed to counteract the false starts of their early
childhood--obsessions regarding dark closets, snakes, or an avenging
Deity.
I am not going to dwell on the intelligence Viola manifested after she
had freed herself from fear. All dogs are wonderful, even when they are
not intelligent. The most stupid dog I know mopes around the house and
refuses to eat whenever his master is away, thus evincing an emotional
sensibility more valuable than the smartness of the most Frenchified of
poodles that ever trod the vaudeville stage. Unlike a collie of my
acquaintance, Viola did not keep the woodbox replenished; nor had she a
vocabulary of several hundred words, like another collie that I know.
Still, she had an aptitude to learn spelling. When it was inadvisable to
take her out for a walk, we spelled the words, vainly trying to conceal
the fact from her, as we would from a child; and often, to this day,
people stop me on the road, and ask if I am the owner of the dog that
knows how to spell.
What I want to dwell on is my own education rather than Viola's, and
this began in earnest after we had moved to the real country, and lived
in a little farmhouse without any farm. Viola was a lovely ornament to
the dooryard; but it seemed a pity that there were no flocks or herds to
evoke her ministering care. We didn't even keep chickens; we were
ostensibly in the country to cultivate thoughts,--such as they
were,--and while Viola might be said to inspire thoughts, they hardly
gave her the necessary exercise. A collie should have a run of ten miles
every day, and it was pathetic to see Viola lying in the dooryard, ears
erect, eyes eager, watching, waiting, hoping for something to happen. I
should not be surprised if her very eagerness attracted the thing she
longed for.
Our next-door neighbor, a man fully as fond of dogs as myself, was early
attracted to her. He had recently lost his own dog, and asked if he
might borrow Viola to help him catch his chickens, and if she might
accompany him on the long drive he took every day through the
countryside. With perfect good will, and in utter innocence, I
consented. Little did I dream, as they say in the novels, of what lay
before me.
I had an idea that Viola would understand that she was merely loaned for
these expeditions; that she would come back from them with undiminished
loyalty, grateful to me for having given her a chance for exercise. But
our friendly neighbor had a very taking way with dogs. Aside from the
wonderful trips, which were enough to turn the head of any collie, he
knew how to talk dog-language better than I did. He knew how to pinch a
dog's ear in the most seductive manner. With him, doggishness was both
an art and a science.
There was nothing lovelier than the sight of Viola rounding up the
chickens, shepherding them into their houses, holding down a
recalcitrant pullet with her paw, or bringing in her mouth a dowager
hen to her foster-father. If I had the gift of a sculptor and wished to
carve a personification of pride, I think I should depict Viola bringing
in a chicken--her tail aloft, like a plume of triumph, her eyes shining,
stepping over imaginary obstacles like a high-manege horse with an air
of dignity that was really ludicrous. If an unlucky chicken got away
from her, away she went across meadows, and over walls, her beautiful
voice vibrating through the landscape, sometimes breaking to an octave
higher in her excitement.
It was fun to see her scour ahead of the wagon when her new master took
her out to help him pick up eggs. It was charming to see her come home
sitting on the seat beside him, tired but still eager, looking to right
and left, sniffing the air, learning all sorts of smell secrets which
are closed forever to our supposedly superior human consciousness. Is it
any wonder that it was necessary for me to go next door to get her, and
that she followed me along the path with a certain droopy air that was
hardly flattering?
There is not much in the literary life that would interest an outdoor
dog. I felt somewhat like a dry-as-dust professor married to a young and
attractive wife who is being taken to all the routs and parties
throughout the neighborhood by a disgustingly youthful and handsome
cavalier. I know nothing quite so shriveling to the soul as jealousy,
nor anything so hard to fight against. I reasoned that Viola's
expeditions were doing her good, that I ought to be grateful for them,
and I repeated the antediluvian fallacy that my jealousy was only
indicative of my love. Nothing that I could say to myself made any
difference; and if I were in danger of forgetting how I felt, there were
plenty of other persons to remind me.
'Well,' said the fisherman, 'I guess you don't know whether that dog is
yours or Lysander's!' And my most intimate friend remarked genially, 'If
I had a dog, I'd want it to be _my_ dog, or I wouldn't want to have
any.'
It was bad enough to bear the sympathy of the community; it was worse to
witness the triumph of my rival. Often, after I had brought home the
drooping Viola, Lysander would follow after her. Instantly she revived
like flowers in water. She smiled, she was even coquettish. They began a
lengthy conversation I could not understand--little sounds from him,
little grunts from her. If, by any chance, through a belated sense of
duty, she happened to remain beside my chair, he surreptitiously snapped
his fingers and made little sucking sounds that he fancied were
inaudible, and then she sidled over to his chair.
If jealously is an index of one's love, it is strange that, the more
jealous I became of Lysander, the less I loved Viola. 'Well, _let_ her
stay with him,' I said to myself. 'I guess he won't object to having me
pay for the license.'
She did stay; she sometimes stayed all night; and few things in my life
have been more humiliating than my visits to get her.
Lysander was glad to see me--oh my, yes! He welcomed me with a crooked
sardonic smile that I understood thoroughly. Viola knew just as well as
he did why I had come, and pretended to take an interest in the
wall-paper. As we walked home along the path, I scolded her, and she
slunk to the ground and asked my pardon. Was there anything in her life
that could make her conscious of any evil? Of course not. Without
realizing it, I was exercising a sort of spiritual coercion over her. I
was really condemning her for what was a true expression of collie life;
but she accepted my suggestion of evil. I have often wondered since, how
many persons in the human realm are suffering from a sense of sin as
false as hers was. Of course, I did not philosophize the situation at
the time. I simply felt disquietude when I was with her. This
disquietude increased rapidly until I apparently disliked her; and I
suppose that in my feeling for her there was actually an element of
hate.
'Very well,' I said to myself in effect, 'there are better dogs in the
world than ever were licensed. The next one I get, I'll keep for my very
own.'
I had now reached my low spot--a centre of indifference; and if this
were fiction, the reader might expect an ever-increasing objective
crescendo from this point onward, culminating in a stirring climax.
Possibly Viola would rescue me from a burning building, thus showing
that she really loved me, after all. Unfortunately I am dealing with
facts of a rather intangible nature. I have noticed that in life coffee
and pistols for two are not called for so often as in literature. We
pass the time of day with an acquaintance, discuss the play, and what
not, little dreaming that behind that smiling exterior a spiritual
crisis may be taking place.
My crisis was rather interesting because it seemed almost physical. Not
so much in the subconscious brain ganglia as in the sympathetic
nerve-centres, the process was taking place--the reverse process of what
had taken place during my period of jealousy. I could almost hear a
spiritual clicking going on inside me, as if I were composed of
children's blocks which had become disarranged and were being replaced
in a symmetrical pattern. One by one, the filaments of possession were
being broken--that sense which in its grossest terms is really a sort of
fatuous pride. Say what we will, most of us feel that we deserve praise
and tribute for having selected so attractive a wife, for having
begotten such charming children. Having no longer any more of a
proprietary interest in Viola than I had in the wild flowers, or the
sea, or sky, I got a fresh eye on her. I could not help admiring her,
and I could not help admiring her for herself alone. Having no longer
any taint of possession, it was impossible for me to impose my will on
her, so I adopted unconsciously the courtesy one shows to some one
else's wife.
'Well, Viola,' I would say, 'do you want to come home to-night? You
don't _have_ to.'
She would look up and listen, cock her ears, consider the matter.
Sometimes she would decide to stay with Lysander, and sometimes,
strangely enough, she would decide to go home with me. If she came, she
came happily, because she was exercising the prerogative of an
independent creature. Her sense of sin or shame left her; and somehow we
were all gainers, Lysander, Viola, and myself. He no longer snapped his
fingers or made little sucking noises. These had been psychical
reactions from my jealous emanations when we were struggling for Viola's
favor; but we were now united in doing what we could to make her happy;
and our friendship, which had suffered previously, in this new office
became confirmed. What expansive talks we had about her! How he rushed
over to tell me the latest example of her wisdom or affection; and when
one expects nothing from a dog, it is rather pleasant to feel suddenly,
while struggling with a sentence, a damp delightful nose inside your
hand.
Sometimes I fancy that Viola, in forming her friendship for Lysander,
had a prevision; for the time came when we had to leave her, and in
whose hands could it be better to leave her than Lysander's and his
wife's?
Most dog stories end with the death of the dog, but I can assure the
reader that Viola is still very much alive. Not agile any longer, she
has become a privileged parlor guest, for the stairs are too much for
her. Sometimes she even finds it impossible to bury a bone, and then she
goes through the pantomime of burying it. She knows that we know that
she has not really done it. Her assumption of achievement is ludicrous.
Who says dogs have not a sense of humor?
She is beautiful as old ladies are beautiful. If she wore a lace
stomacher, she would make a magnificent Rembrandt--rich browns, tawny
gold, and, in the heart of the picture, the spirit of her personality as
mellow and pervasive as a flame.