My friends, the Parasangs, both died last week. Mr. Parasang was carried
off by a slight attack of pneumonia as dust is wiped away by a cloth,
and Mrs. Parasang followed him within three days. He was in life a
rather energetic man, and she always lagged a little behind him when
they went abroad walking together, keeping pretty close to him,
notwithstanding. So it was in death. It was the shock of the thing, they
say, that killed her, she lacking any great strength; but to me it seems
to have been chiefly force of habit and the effect of what romantic
people call being in love. She was in love with her husband, as he had
been with her. And what was the use of staying here, he gone?
They were buried together, and I was one of the pall-bearers at the
double funeral; indeed, I was the directing spirit, having been so
connected with the Parasangs that I was their close friend, and the
person to whom every one naturally turned in the adjustment of matters
concerning them. When Mr. Parasang died, the first instinct of his wife
was to tell them to send for me, and when I reached their home--for I
was absent from the city--I found that she had clung to and followed
him as usual, as he liked it to be. It was what he lived for as long as
he could live at all.
They had ordered a fine coffin for Parasang, and when I came he was
lying in it. Mrs. Parasang was lying where she had died, in bed. And
they had ordered another fine coffin for her. (Of course, when I refer
to the bodies as Mr. and Mrs. Parasang it must be understood that I
consider only the earthly tenements, for I am a religious man.) I did
not like it. I went to the undertaker and asked him if he could not make
a coffin for two. He answered that it was somewhat of an unusual order,
that there were styles and fashions in coffins just as there are in
shoes and hats and things of that sort, and that it would be a difficult
work for him to accomplish, in addition to being most expensive. I did
not argue with him at all, for I knew be had the advantage of me. I am
not an expert in coffins, and, of course, could not meet him upon his
own ground. If it had been the purchase of a horse or gun or dog, or a
new typewriting machine, it would have been an altogether different
thing.
I simply told the undertaker to go ahead and make such a coffin as I had
ordered, regardless of expense. I wanted it softly cushioned, and I told
him not to make it unnecessarily wide. I wanted them side by side, with
their faces turned upward, of course, so that we could all have a fair
last look at them, but I wanted them so close together that they would
be touching from head to foot. I wanted it so that when they became dust
and bone all would be mingled, and that even the hair, which does not
decay for some centuries, which grows, you know, after death, would be
all twined together.
The undertaker followed my instructions, for undertakers get to be as
mechanical as shoemakers or ticket-sellers; but the relations of the
Parasangs and close friends at home thought it an odd thing to have
done. I overrode them and had things all my own way, for I knew I was
right. I knew the Parasangs better than any one else. I knew what they
would have me do were communications between us still possible.
There was something so odd about the love story of the Parasangs that it
always interested me. It made me laugh, but I was in full sympathy with
them, though sympathy was something of which they were not in need. The
queer thing about it was their age.
Mr. Parasang and I were cronies. We were cronies despite the number of
years which had elapsed since our respective births. He was
seventy-eight. Mrs. Parasang was seventy-five. And they had been married
but two years. I knew Mr. Parasang before the wedding, and it was
because of my close intimacy with him that I came to know the relations
between the two and the story of it. I was just forty years his junior.
I can't understand why the man died so easily. He was such a
vigorous-looking person for his age, and seemed in such perfect health.
He was one of your apparently strong, gray-mustached old men, and did
not look to be more than sixty-five at most. His wife, I think, was
really stronger than he, though she did not appear so young. It is often
that way with women. The attack of pneumonia which came upon Parasang
was not, the doctors told me, vicious enough to overthrow an ordinary
man. I suppose it was merely that this man's life capital had run out.
There is a great deal in heredity. Sometimes I think that each child is
born with just such a capital and vitality, something which could be
represented in figures if we knew how to do it; and that, though it is
affected to an extent by ways of living, the amount of capital
determines, within certain limits, to a certainty how long its possessor
will do business on this round lump of earth. I think Parasang's time
for liquidation had come. That is all. As for Mrs. Parasang, I think she
could have stayed a little longer if she had cared to do so, but she
went away because he had gone. One can just lie down and die sometimes.
I have drifted away from what I was going to say--this problem of dying
always attracts--but I will try to get back to the subject proper. I was
going to tell of the odd love story of the Parasangs, or at least what
struck me as odd, because, as I have said, of their ages. There is
nothing in it particular aside from that.
A little less than fifty years ago--that must have been about when
Taylor was President--Parasang was engaged to marry a girl of whom he
was very fond, and who was very fond of him. Well, these two, much in
love, and just suited to each other, must needs have a difference of the
sort known as a lovers' quarrel. That in itself was nothing to speak of,
for most lovers, being young and fools, do the same thing. But it so
happened that these two, being also high-spirited, carried the
difference farther than is usual with smitten, callow males and females,
and let the breach widen until they separated, as they thought, finally.
And she married in course of time, and so did he. It's a way people
have; a way more or less good or bad, according to circumstances. She
lived with a commonplace husband until he died and left her a widow,
aged sixty or thereabout. Mr. Parasang's wife died about the same time.
What sort of a woman she was I do not know. I remember the old gentleman
told me once that she was an excellent housekeeper and had the gift of
talking late o' nights. I could not always tell what Parasang meant when
he said things. He was one of the sort of old gentlemen who leave much
to be inferred.
Parasang had drifted here, and was a reasonably well-to-do man. His old
sweetheart had come also because her late husband had made an
investment here, and she found it to her interest to live where her
income was mostly earned. Neither knew how near the other was, and the
years passed by. Eventually the two met by an accident of the sheerest
kind. Possibly they had almost forgotten each other, though I don't
think that is so. They met among mutual friends, and--there they were. I
have often wondered how it must seem to meet after half a century. There
is something about the brain which makes the reminiscences fresh to one
sometimes, but of an early love story it must be like a dream to the
aged. Something uncertain and vaguely sweet. Just think of it--half a
century, more than one generation, had passed since these two had met.
Their old love story must have seemed to them something all unreal,
something they had but read long ago in a book.
Parasang was a large man, but Mrs. Blood--that was now his old
sweetheart's name--was a small woman. Her hair was nearly white when I
met her, but from the color of a few unchanged strands of it, I imagine
that it must have been red when she was young. Maybe that was why the
lovers' quarrel of over fifty years ago had been so spirited. She was
both spirited and charming, even at seventy-two, and at twenty must have
been a fascinating woman. Parasang was doubtless himself a striking
person when he was young. I have already said what he was like in his
old age. Both the man and woman had retained the personal regard for
themselves which is so pleasant in old people, and Mrs. Blood was still
as dainty as could be, in her trim gowns, generally of some fluffy black
or silvery gray material, and Parasang was as strong and wholesome
looking as an ox. I shall always regret that I was not present when they
met. A study of their faces then would have been worth while.
Parasang once told me about this second wooing of his wife--and it was
droll. There seemed nothing funny about it to him. He said that after
being introduced to Mrs. Blood, and recognizing her in an instant after
all those years, as she did him, they sat down on a sofa together, being
left to entertain each other, as the two oldest people in the room; and
that he uttered a few commonplace sentences, and she replied gently in
the same vein for a little time; and that then each stopped talking, and
that they sat there quietly gazing at each other. And he said that
somehow, looking into her eyes, even with the delicate glasses on them,
the earth seemed to be slipping away, and there was the girl he had
known and loved again beside him; and then the years passed by in
another direction, only more slowly. And the girl seemed to get a little
older and a little older, and the hair changed and the cheeks fell a
little at the sides just below the mouth, you know, and there came
crow's feet at the outer corners of her eyes, and wrinkles across her
neck, but that nothing of all this physical happening ever changed one
iota the real look of her, the look which is from the heart of a woman
when a man has once really known her. And so the years glided over their
course, she changing a little with each, yet never really changing at
all, until it came again up to the present moment, with her beside him
on the sofa, real and tangible, just as he would have her in every way.
"I don't suppose you can understand it," he said, "for you are only a
boy in such things yet" (those old fellows call everything under fifty a
boy); "but I tell you it is a wonderful thing to know what a love is
that can come out of the catacombs, so to speak, and be all itself
again," and he said this as jauntily as if I, being so young, couldn't
know anything about the proper article, as far as sentiment was
concerned.
They sat there on the sofa, he said, still silent and looking at each
other. At last, when he had fully realized it all, he spoke.
"I knew that you were a widow, Jennie, but I did not know that you were
living here."
She explained that she had been in the city for some time and the reason
of it, and then the conversation lagged again; and they were very much
like two young people at a children's party, save that they were
dreaming rather than embarrassed, and that, I suppose, they felt the dry
germ of another age seeking the air and the sunshine of living. You
know they have found grains of wheat in the Egyptian mummy cases, which
were laid away over three thousand years ago, and that these grains of
wheat, under the new conditions, have sprouted and grown and shot up
green stalks and borne plump seeds again. And the love of Mr. and Mrs.
Parasang has always reminded me of the mummy wheat.
They talked a little of old friends and of old times, but their talk was
not all unconstrained, because, you see, they couldn't refer to those
former times and scenes without recalling, involuntarily, some day or
some hour when they two were together, and when there seemed a chain
between their hearts which nothing in the world could break. It was an
awful commentary on the quality of human love and human pledges that
things should be as they had been and as they were. It was a reflection,
in a sense, on each of them. How hollow had been everything--and it was
all their fault.
They both kept looking at each other, and when they parted he asked if
he might call upon her, and she assented quietly. He called next day,
and found her all alone, for a niece who lived with her had gone away;
and they became, he said, a little more at ease. And then began the most
delicate of all wooings. I met them sometimes then and guessed at it,
though as yet Parasang had not told me the story. He was more
considerate, I imagine, than he had been in youth, and she, it may be,
less exacting. It was a mellow relationship, yet with a shyness that was
amazing. They were drifting together upon soft waves of memory, yet
wondering at the happening.
And one day he asked her if she would be his wife. She had known, of
course--a woman always knows--but she blushed and looked up at him, and
tears came into her eyes.
And he thought of the time, so long ago, when he had asked her the same
question. He could not help it. And somehow she did not seem less. He
thought only of how foolish they had been to throw away a heritage of
belonging to each other; and then he thought of how the man, the
protector, the guardian of both, should have taken the broader view and
have been above all pettishness and have yielded for the sake of both.
She would not have thought more lightly of him. She would have
understood some day. For the lost past he blamed himself alone.
She answered him at last, but it was not as she had answered once. She
spoke sweetly and bravely of their age and of the uselessness of it all
now, and of what people would say, and of other things. But her eyes
were just as loving as when his hair was dark.
And when she had said all those things he did what made me like him.
There was good stuff in Parasang. He merely took her in his arms.
Furthermore, he told her when they would be married. And I was at the
wedding on that day.
It was six months later when I got the habit of dining with them pretty
regularly and of calling for Parasang on my way down town in the
morning. She came into the hall with him, as do young wives, and kissed
him good-by, and it pleased and interested me amazingly. The outlines of
their mouths were not the same as they were half a century ago, and as
he bent over her I thought each time of--
"And their spirits rushed together
At the meeting of the lips";
and it would occur to me queerly that spirits had but slender causeway
there. I was mistaken, though. I learned that later.
There was but this variation between the early wedded life of this aged
pair and of what would possibly have happened had they married young.
There were no differences and no "makings-up." It was a pleasant
stream--I knew it would be--but the volume of it surprised me.
That is all. There is no plot to the story of what I know of these dear
friends of mine whom I cannot see now. And it was but because of what I
have told that I had them buried as they were. There was nothing, from
the ordinary standpoint, which justified my course in overrunning those
other people who would have buried the two apart; but I believe myself
that one should, within reason, seek to gratify the fancies of one's
closest friends.