THEIR FOOLISH WAYS.
It is, as I have said so often, but the simple story of two friends of
mine I am trying to tell, but I wish I had more gift in that direction.
I wish I could paint, just as an artist with brush and colors
reproduces something, the home life in the house where much of my time
was spent. I can but give a mechanical idea of what it was, but to me
it was very pleasant.
A very shrewd politician Jean became, after the famous contest in which
the Ninth Ward aided us to victory, and we were accustomed to consult
her on the social bearings of many a struggle. In case she became too
arbitrary on any occasion Grant had fallen into the way of calling the
Ape, and asking him to remove her, whereupon the youth would carry off
his small mother in his arms and insist that, as he put it, from a
childhood expression, with a long "a," she "'have herself." There was
ever this quality of the whimsical about life in this home. And I am
inclined to believe that the world is better for such a flavor.
The children, were well grown now, the family was rounded out, and
Grant's mustache, gray when he was forty, was now grayer still, though
Jean's brown hair showed yet no glint of silver. I asked one day after
dinner, when we two were idling and smoking in the library, and Jean
was hovering about, if she hadn't a gray hair yet, and Grant said no,
without hesitation, though the lady herself seemed less assured. Then
happened a curious thing, at least to me. I asked Grant how he knew so
well, if even his wife, who, being a woman and fair to look upon, would
be naturally apprehensive of any change in aspect, could not tell if a
gray hair had come, and he but laughed at me. "Come here, Jean," he
said.
She came and stood, beside him, close to me.
"Alf," said he, "I have a vast opinion of you, but there are some
things I imagine you do not comprehend. You should have blended your
life with that of some such creature as this, and you would have
developed a new faculty. Now I close my eyes. Ask me anything about
her--I don't mean about her dress, but about her head or hands, all you
can see of the real woman."
I accepted the challenge, and there was great sport, and a little-great
result. I made the inquest a most searching and minute affair. I
asked him to tell me if there were any mark upon the neck, near one
ear, and he described the precise locality and outline of a tiny brown
fleck, no larger than a pin's head. He told of any little dimple, of
any sweep of the downward growth of the brown hair, of any trifling
scar from childhood. And of her chin and neck he told the very
markings, in a way that was something wonderful. His eyes were closed,
and his face was turned away from us, but this made no difference. He
described to me even the character of the wonderful network in the
palms of her little hands. Then he opened his eyes and turned to me,
chaffingly:
"You see how ignorant is a man of your sort. Having no world worth
speaking of, he knows nothing of geography."
I do not believe that even Jean herself knew, before, of how even the
physical being of her had been impressed upon the heart and brain of
this man. She listened curiously and wonderingly when, he was talking
with his eyes closed, and when he opened them and began his nonsense
with me she stood looking at him silently, then suddenly left the room.
It was a way of Jean's to flee to her own room for a little season when
something touched her, and I imagine this was one of the occasions.
She had known for long years how two souls could become knitted and
interwoven into one, but I do not believe that before this incident she
had ever comprehended how her physical self, as well, had become an
ever present picture upon the mind's retina of her lover and her
husband.
I am worried, and bothered. I am a man past middle age. I shall never
marry now, and shall but drift into a time of doing some little, I
hope, toward making things easier for some other men and some women,
and then--into a crematory. I have a fancy that my body, this machine
of flesh and muscle in which I live, should not be boxed and buried in
seeping earth to become a foul thing. That was an idea I learned from
this firm friend of mine. I want it burned, and all of it, save the
little urn full of white ashes which some one may care for, to go out
and mingle with the pure air, and there to be one of earth's good
things, and to be breathed in again and make part of the life of the
maple leaf, or the young girl going to school in the morning, or the
old-fashioned pinks in the front yard of the old-fashioned people, or
the red roses in the florist's hot-houses. I have that fancy.
I am worried because I, clumsy, dull-thinking man, cannot tell what I
wish to tell of a life I saw. I am worried because I cannot make
others understand it as it was. It seems to me it would do some good
in the world. It seems to me that many a man and woman, if they could
know about Grant and Jean, who really lived,--for this is but a tale of
fact,--would be now more loving and better men and women because of it.
But I do not know how to tell of what I saw and what I knew.
Grant was over sixty years old at this time of which I write, and I am
coming very near the end, and Jean was past forty, and the two were not
much different from what they were when I first saw them together. I
suppose it was partly because I had been with them so much that I did
not note the changes nature wrought in this pair of her children, but
certainly they were far younger than their years. They had found
together the only fountain of eternal youth which exists or ever will
exist upon this planet which threw off a barren moon and bred monsters
and, later, mastodons and apes, and finally made a specialty of men and
women. They laughed at time, and hoped for a future of souls after
this trial. I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, when they
spoke together. They were blended, and it made life worth the living.
What I learned conveyed to me new things. It taught me that all there
is in novels is not romance nor untrue. It taught me that a male and
female of this species of ours may meet, and from the two may come an
entity which is something very near divine. Why is it, I wonder, that
the right man and the right woman out of the hundreds of millions meet
so seldom at the fitting time, and that life is either so barren or so
jagged and hurtful because of the non-meeting of those who should be
mated? What a world this might be! Of course, though, there is some
higher thought, and it is all right in some way.
They were what you would call religious, Grant and Jean. They liked
the same church--it doesn't matter which it was--and attended
regularly, and worshiped without much regard for its more narrow
legends. They did not trouble themselves with the idea of the
everlasting punishment of babes, nor the fate of the untutored heathen.
They had, somehow, a simple idea that the human being who tried to do
right according to his or her views was all right as to the future.
They were not much in sympathy with what is called heretic-hunting.
They had each read the story of the gentle Nazarene, and had failed to
learn that there was more than one church--a church without either
spectacular effects or creed bickerings. A church of the group who, at
one time, clung to Him and His teachings, and so had shaped their
course. To them a narrow, grim old Presbyterian--were he but honest
and earnest according to his inherited brain and intelligence--might,
some time, a year or ten million years from now, be walking arm and arm
along the sidewalks of some glorious street of some New Jerusalem with
the Jesuit of to-day, honest and earnest according to his brain and his
intelligence. This is not reasoning. Was it a bad creed?
They were not afraid of old age as it came nearer, hour by hour and day
by day, these friends of mine. They had pondered of it much, of
course, for they were thoughtful people, and they had talked of it
doubtless many times, for there was little of which they thought that
the two did not reveal to each other in plain words; but they were not
troubled over the outlook. They seemed to realize that the flower is
no greater than what follows, that fruit is the sequel of all
fragrance, and that to those who reason rightly there is no difference
in the income of what is good in all the seasons of human being. I
remember well an incident of one evening.
We had been playing billiards, Grant and I. He had a table in his
house and had taught Jean how to play until she had become a terror,
though the Ape had nearly caught up with her in skill, and there was,
at this time, a great pretended struggle between them, and we had come
up into the library after a hard after-dinner game. Jean came in, and
we talked of various things, and looked at some old books, and,
somehow--I forget the connection--began talking of old age. It was in
the midst of our debate that Grant, after his insane way, suddenly
leaped up and, standing beside me as I sat, proceeded to make me an
oration. He talked of the friction of things and of the future of this
soul or mind of ours, concerning the luck of which we know so little.
And, while I may or may not have agreed with his general theories, I
did not disagree with the one that the autumn is as much a part of what
there is as is the spring, and that all trends toward a common end,
which must be for the best in some way we do not comprehend, because we
see, at least, enough to know that nature, wiser than we, makes no
mistakes. "The fruitage 'goes'!" Grant exclaimed larkingly, and then,
forgetting me for the moment, he caught up Jean, and, carrying her
gravely about, repeated to her these lines:
"Grow old, along with me;
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made!"
And they were at least exponents of the belief they had, and it was to
me an education and a comfort. I learned, what I could not profit by,
that a man and woman together are more than twice one man or twice one
woman, when the man and woman are the right two. It was like an
astronomer studying the sun. And what warmth and light there was to
look upon!
I have tried in these rambling words to tell how these two people faced
the autumn and found it spring, since they were still together. I
wonder why I made the attempt? It is but a simple relation of certain
things which happened, yet I do not, somehow, get the pulse of it. It
must be because I have known the people all too well. My heart is so
much in what I try to say that I am not clear.