ILLUSIONS
As I look back upon my childhood, it seems as if the world were an
illusion and as if everything were magic that passed before my eyes.
True, we children learned our lessons in our arithmetics and geographies
and readers, but we only learned by rote and said them from our lips;
they had no application to our lives,—they were only tasks which we must
get through before our foolish parents and unkind teachers would leave
us free to live. We seem to have breathed an enchanted air, and to see
nothing as it really was. And still, can I be sure of this? Are the
heartbeats of the young less natural and spontaneous than those of later
life? Are the vision and hearing and emotions of youth less trustworthy
than the dulled faculties and feelings of maturer years? Certain it is
we children lived in a world that was all our own,—a world into which
grown-up people could not come, from which in fact they had long since
passed out never to return.
But we had our illusions and our dreams. Time and distance and
proportion did not exist for us. Time is ever illusive to young and old
alike; it is no sooner come than it is gone. The past is regretted, the
present disappointing; the future alone is trusted, and thought to be
worth our pains. Childhood is the happiest time of life, because the
past is so wholly forgotten, the present so fleeting, and the future so
endlessly long. But how little I really knew of time, of youth and of
age, when I was young! We children thought that old age lay just beyond
the time when childish sports would not amuse. We could see nothing in
life beyond thirty that would make it worth living, excepting for a very
few who were the conquerors of the world. True, we dreamed of our future
great achievements, but these were still far off, and to be reached in
strange fantastic ways. The present and the near future were only for
our childish joys. We looked at older people half in pity, half in fear.
I distinctly remember that when a child at the district school I thought
the boys and girls at the Academy were getting old.
As to my parents, they always seemed old; and when I was not vexed about
things they would not let me do, I felt sad to think their days of sport
were past and gone. I well remember the terrible day when they laid my
mother in her grave, and the one consolation I felt was that she had
lived a long life and that her natural time had come. Even now, as I
look back on the vague remembrances of my mother, I have no thought of
any time when she was not old. Yet last year I went to see the little
headstone that marks her modest grave. I read her name, and the
commonplace lines that said she had been a good wife and a loving
mother; and this I have no doubt was true, even though I found it on a
churchyard stone. Poor soul! she never had a chance to be anything else
or more. But when I looked to see her age, I felt a shock as of one
waking from a dream; for there, chiselled in the marble stone and
already growing green with moss, I read that she had died at
forty-eight. And here I stood looking at my old mother’s grave, and my
last birthday was my forty-sixth. Was my mother then so young when she
lay down to sleep?—and all my life I had thought that she was old! I
felt and knew, as I sadly looked upon the stone, that my career was all
before me still, and that I had only been wandering and blundering in a
zigzag path through childhood and youth, to begin the career I was about
to run. True, as I drew close to the marble slab to read the smaller
letters that told of the virtues of the dead, I put on a pair of
gold-rimmed glasses to spell the chiselled words. And these glasses were
my second pair! Only a few days before, I had visited an oculist and
told him that my old ones somehow did not focus as they should, but
warned him not to give me a new pair that magnified the letters any more
than the ones I had. After several trials he found a pair through which
I could see much clearer than before, and he assured me on his honor
that they were no stronger than the ones I was about to lay aside,—only
they were ground in a different way. And although I had lived on the
earth for six and forty years, I believed he told the truth. I
remembered, too, that only a few days before an impudent college
football hero gave me a seat in the street-car while he stood up. But
then college boys were always thoughtless and ill-mannered, and boastful
of their strength. I recovered from the shock that came upon me as I
realized that my mother had died while she was really young; and then my
mind recalled a day that had been buried in oblivion for many, many
years,—a day when I rested upon the same spot where I was sitting now,
and when the tremendous thought of eternal sleep dawned upon my mind. No
doubt it was my mother’s stone that so long ago awakened me to conscious
life. I remember that on that far-off day I was fifteen years of age,
and that I consoled myself by thinking that at any rate I should live
until I was sixty, which was so far away that I could not even dream
that it would ever come. And now I was here again, and forty-six. Well,
my health was good, my ancestors were long-lived,—all except my mother,
who came to an untimely grave,—and I should live to be ninety at the
very least. And then—there might be another world. No one can prove that
there is not.
But I am lingering too long around the old graveyard of my childhood
home, and if I do not go out into the living, moving world, no one will
ever read my book. And still I fancy that I am like all the other men
and women who were ever born; we eat and drink, and laugh and dance, and
go our way along the path of life, and join the universal conspiracy to
keep silent on the momentous final event that year by year draws closer
to our lives.
Distance was as vague and illusive and as hard to realize as time. A
trip to the next town, four miles away, awoke in my mind all the feeling
of change and travel and adventure that a voyage across the sea can
bring to-day. I recall one great event that stands out clearly in my
childhood days. For months and months I had been promised a long trip
with my older sister to visit my Aunt Jane. She lived miles and miles
away, and we must take a railroad train to reach her home. For weeks I
revelled in the expectation of that long-promised trip. I wondered if
the train would really stop at our station long enough for me to get on
board; if there would be danger of falling out if I should raise the
window of the car; and what would happen if we should be carried past
the town, or the train should run off the track. I am always sure of a
fresh emotion when I think of the moment that we were safely seated in
the car and the train began to move away. How I watched and wondered as
the houses and telegraph poles flew past in our mad flight! And how I
stored my mind with facts and fancies to tell the wondering boys when I
returned! if indeed I ever should. I remember particularly how I pleaded
with the train conductor to let me keep the pasteboard ticket that had
been handed to me through the hole in the little window at the station
when I took the train. I felt that this would be a souvenir of priceless
worth, but the conductor regretfully told me that he must deny my wish.
It seems even now as if I journeyed across a continent, there were so
many things to see that were wholly new and strange. And yet my Aunt
Jane lived only twenty miles away, and the trip must have been made in
one short hour or less. Many times since then I have boarded a train to
cross half the continent. I have even stood on the platform of the
Orient Express in Paris, and waited for the signal to start on the long
journey across Europe to Constantinople; but I have never felt such
emotions as stirred my soul when the train actually moved away to take
me to see Aunt Jane.
Men and their works are indeed inconsistent. The primitive savage who
dwelt at home went to a foreign land when he moved his tent or paddled
his log canoe across the stream; but civilized man, with his machines,
inventions, and contrivances, has brought the world into such close
connection that we must journey almost around the earth to find
something new and strange.
Not time and space alone, but also men and women, were illusive to our
young minds. My Sunday-school teacher, a fat asthmatic woman, who always
held her lesson-paper between her stiff thumb and finger covered with a
black glove, seemed a wonderful personage to me. How was it possible she
could know so much about Palestine and Jerusalem and Judæa and the Dead
Sea? Surely she had never visited these mythical realms, for there was
no way to go. As easily might she have gone to the moon, or to some of
the fixed stars; and still she talked of these things with the
familiarity with which she would have spoken of a neighboring town. I
never had any idea that she was like a common woman, until one day when
I went to her house and found her with her sleeves rolled up and a great
apron reaching clear around her dress, and she was washing clothes.
After that, the spell was broken. How could anyone wash clothes if she
really knew about Paul and John the Baptist and the river Jordan?
All the grown-up men seemed strange and unreal to my mind, and to have
nothing in common with the boys. No matter what we did, we thought that
if any man should come around he had a right promptly to make us stop.
Most of the men never seemed to notice us, unless to forbid our doing
certain things, or to ask us to turn a grindstone while they sharpened
an axe or a scythe; and there were only a very few who even knew our
names. Once in a long while some man would call me “that Smith boy,” but
even then he seemed a little doubtful who I really was. If now and then
a grown-up man took a friendly interest in our sports, or called us by
our first names, we liked him, and would have voted for him for
President of the United States if we could have had the chance.
I well remember Deacon Cole. I used always to see him in one of the
front pews at church. Every Sunday morning he drove by our home, and he
was usually the very first to pass. He wore a ruffled shirt, a long
black coat, and a collar that almost hid his chin. His face was long and
sad, and he never looked to the right or left during the services at the
church. I had no doubt he was a very holy man. He always took up the
collection just before the benediction had been said, and his boots
would creak as he tiptoed from pew to pew. I did not know just what a
deacon was, or how anyone ever happened to be a deacon. I remember I
once asked my father; and although he could tell me all about Cæsar and
Plato and Herodotus, he could never make it clear how Mr. Cole ever
became “Deacon Cole.” But one day when I was down at the mill, a farmer
drove up to the door with a load of corn. He wore overalls, an old
patched coat, and a big straw hat. I looked at him closely before I
could believe that he was Deacon Cole, and then slowly another illusion
was dissolved. I found that a deacon was a man just like my father and
other men that I had known.