After a long walk through Richmond Park and by the Thames one
afternoon recently, I went with a companion into a refreshment-place
for tea. As we waited for service there entered a tall, stout,
elderly gentleman in a tall hat. He took a seat at a table not far
off. The face seemed familiar to me, notably the heavy under-jaw
that projected with a formidable air of determination. I ransacked
my memory a moment, and the identity of the stout, elderly gentleman
came back to me vividly. I drew my companion's attention to him, and
then raised the second finger of my right hand on which the bone
between the first and second joints was palpably enlarged. "That," I
said, "is a little memorial which that gentleman in the tall hat gave
me forty years ago. He was a good bowler in those days, straight and
fast, and a good length, but he had a trick of getting up badly, and
when he hit you he hit you hard. One day he hit me in practice when
I was playing without a glove, and this is his signature."
But it was not this memory that made the elderly gentleman chiefly
interesting to me. It was the fact that he was elderly--so
flagrantly elderly. The last time I had seen him he was a stalwart
young fellow, quick in his movements, with his head and body thrust a
little forward as though his legs could not quite keep pace with his
purpose, and with that formidable chin sticking out as it were in
challenge to the future. Now he would have passed for an alderman,
"in fair round belly." He moved heavily and slowly like one who had
reached whatever goal he had set out after and had no more use for
that determined under-jaw. In looking at him I seemed to see myself
in a mirror. I must be elderly like that, too. If he were to
recognise me as I had recognised him he, no doubt, would be as
surprised as I had been to find what an elderly person I had grown
into since the days when I was a fresh-coloured youth and we played
cricket together.
It is by these reflected lights that the havoc which the years play
with us is visible to us. The approach of age is so stealthy that we
do not perceive it in ourselves. Others grow old, but we live on
under the illusion of unchanging youth. There may be a bald patch on
the head; but that is nothing. Quite young fellows have bald patches
on the head. That eminent lawyer, Mr. Billson Stork, was bald at
twenty-five, and at thirty-five had not a hair above his ears. No,
baldness is no evidence. Nor are grey hairs evidence. We all know
people who were grey-headed in their early manhood. It is true that
we do not run now as we used; but that is simply because we do not
want to run. What is there to run for? All these things are
discounted by the dissimulating spirit that dwells in us and refuses
to let us know that we are visibly taking our place among the old
fellows.
Then some incident like that I have described dissipates momentarily
the pleasant illusion that defies the calendar. Perhaps someone in
the bus, full of good intentions, offers you his seat. You are glad
of the seat and you appreciate the kindness, but your feelings are
complicated by the suggestion that you bear about you the stigmata of
decrepitude. You have become a person whose venerable years entitle
you to consideration. You realise, almost with a shock, that to the
eyes of that admirable young man in the bus you are an old gentleman
whom it would be indecent to leave hanging on to a strap. It is a
disillusioning experience, and if the young man could read your mind
he would probably conclude that the higher courtesy would have been
to keep his seat and leave you your comfortable fancy. There are
cases when politeness cuts deeper than impertinence. I myself saw an
illustration of this in a bus only yesterday, when a young fellow
rose to make room for a very stout lady, although there was a vacant
seat beside him. It is true that the stout lady really needed two
seats, but she did not want the fact proclaimed in that public way,
and her anxiety to point out to the young man that there was still a
vacant seat showed that the stout as well as the elderly can nurse
illusions about themselves.
But it is in his own family that the sharpest reminders of the cold
truth are borne in upon the elderly. There was a time, it does not
seem long ago, when you were an Olympian to your children, when the
cloud on your brow had the authority of Jove, and the lightest word
on your lips was a Delphic oracle. That phase passed insensibly.
You began to measure yourself in your slippers with the new
generation. You began to discover that they could wear your boots,
and then that they could not wear your boots. A little later and you
knew that you had come down from Olympus altogether, and that these
young people had ideas which were not your ideas, that they belonged
to a new world which was not your old, unchallenged world. They had
ceased to be your children and had become something like brothers and
sisters. All this accomplished itself so quietly, so naturally, that
you did not notice it.
Then, one day, something happens, a trifling action, it may be, a
trifling word, an accent, a gesture, but it is enough. It lifts the
curtain of your fiction. You know that you have changed places with
the children of yester-year. They are no longer your children. They
have ceased even to be your brothers and sisters. They are becoming
a sort of maiden aunt or benevolent uncle. You realise that to them
you have become something of an antiquity, a person who must be
humoured because of his enormous past and his exiguous future. You
feel that if you are not careful you will be invited to take
somebody's arm to steady you. You suspect that your ways are the
source of amusement, respectful but undisguised, like the ways of a
rather wayward child. In short, you learn that you are no longer the
young fellow you have imagined yourself to be, but an elderly person,
like any other elderly person of your years. It is not an unpleasant
discovery. It may even be a pleasant discovery. And in any case it
is only a passing spasm. The indomitable youth within soon puts the
revelation aside. I suspect that he never really does grow elderly,
no matter what tales the vesture of decay in which he is clothed may
tell about him to the outside world.