Sententious people are fond of telling us that we change entirely every
seven years, that in that time every single atomy of body (and soul?)
finds a substitute. Personally, I am of opinion that we change oftener,
that rather we are triennial in our constitution. In fact, it is a change
we owe to our spiritual cleanliness. But there is a truth pertaining to
the change of which the sententious people are not, I think, aware. When
they speak of our sloughing our dead selves, they imagine the husk left
behind as a dead length of hollow scale or skin. Would it were so. These
sententious people, with all their information, have probably never gone
through the process of which they speak. They have never changed from the
beginning, but have been consistently their dull selves all through. To
those, however, who can look back on many a metamorphosis, the
quick-change artists of life, a fearful thing is known. The length of
discarded snake lies glistering in the greenwood, motionless, and slowly
perishes with the fallen leaves in autumn. But for the dead self is no
autumn. By some mysterious law of spiritual propagation, it breaks away
from us, a living thing, as the offspring of primitive organisms are, it
is said, broken off the tail of their sole and undivided parent. It goes
on living as we go on living; often, indeed, if we be poets or artists, it
survives us many years; it may be a friend, but it is oftener a foe; and
it is always a sad companion.
I sat one evening in my sumptuous library near Rutland Gate. I was deep in
my favourite author, my bank-book, when presently an entry--as a matter of
fact, a quarterly allowance to a friend (well, a woman friend) of my
youth--set me thinking. Just then my man entered. A youth wished to see
me. He would not give his name, but sent word that I knew him very well
for all that. Being in a good humour, I consented to see him. He was a
young man of about twenty, and his shabby clothes could not conceal that
he was comely. He entered the room with light step and chin in air, and to
my surprise he strode over to where I sat and seated himself without a
word. Then he looked at me with his blue eyes, and I recognised him with a
start 'What's the new book?' he asked eagerly, pointing to my open
bank-book.
Bending over he looked at it: 'Pshaw! Figures. You used not to care much
about them. When we were together it used to be Swinburne's _Poems and
Ballads_, or Shakespeare's _Sonnets_!'
As he spoke he tugged a faded copy of the _Sonnets_ from his pocket. It
slipped from his hand. As it fell it opened, and faded violets rained from
its leaves. The youth gathered them up carefully, as though they had been
valuable, and replaced them.
'How do you sell your violets?' I asked, ironically. 'I'll give you a
pound apiece for them!'
'A pound! Twenty pounds apiece wouldn't buy them,' he laughed, and I
remembered that they were the violets Alice Sunshine and I had gathered
one spring day when I was twenty. We had found them in a corner of the
dingle, where I had been reading the _Sonnets_ to her, till in our book
that day we read no more. As we parted she pressed them between the leaves
and kissed them. I remember, too, that I had been particular to write the
day and hour against them, and I remember further how it puzzled me a
couple of years after what the date could possibly mean.
Having secured his book, my visitor once more looked me straight in the
face, and as he did so he seemed to grow perplexed and disappointed. As I
gazed at him my contentment, too, seemed to be slowly melting away. Five
minutes before I had felt the most comfortable _bourgeois_ in the world.
There seemed nothing I was in need of, but there was something about this
youth that was dangerously disillusionising. Here was I already envying
him his paltry violets. I was even weak enough to offer him five pounds
apiece for them, but he still smilingly shook his head.
'Well!' he said presently, 'what have you been doing with yourself all
these years?'