Part 11

Charles Lamb, in his "Grace Before Meat," protests--very endearingly, it seems to me--against the custom of particular thankfulness for food. He suspects that it had its origin in the "hunter state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing; when a bellyful was a windfall and looked like a special Providence.--"It is not otherwise easy to be understood," he avers, "why the blessing of food--the act of eating--should have had a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence."

I find myself like-minded and similarly protestant as to birthdays. I cannot discover why the blessing of these should be hailed with any very particular delight, distinct from that implied joy with which we might be expected to welcome the many other various days of the year.

It cannot be said that it was because I was abnormally shy throughout my childhood that I found birthdays embarrassing, for I had no more than the usual shyness of the average child. Moreover, my surroundings and training gave me easy confidence in others and in myself. The tragedies of my little girlhood were not exceptional: dead cats or canaries, broken dolls, the inability to make myself always understood by grown-ups, and certain moral and spiritual failures and cataclysms known only to myself and what I took to be my fearfully disappointed Maker. But barring these things, incident and customary, my early years may be said to have been especially bright and reassuring. What was it, then, which could have caused this early distrust of birthdays?

If I am to trace the growth of what perhaps seems so unwarranted a thing, I shall have to ask indulgence for what may appear to be some of that very egotism I decry: I shall have to ask to be allowed a discussion of several of my own birthdays, and their celebration when I was a child.

My fifth is the earliest that I remember. I had been promised a cake with candles. Moreover, I had learned, by dint of the patience of Mademoiselle Cinque, our queer old French governess, a little French song, which I was to sing as my own share toward the festive celebration. From the shelter of my father's arm, I was to sing it for the rest to hear:--

"_Frè-re Jac-ques! Frè-re Jac-ques! Dor-mez vous? Dor-mez vous? Son-nez les matines; son-nez les matines; Den, din, don!_"

The cake, then, and the song were, from my point of view, the extraordinarily important and sufficient events of the day--these and the fact that on that day I would be five years old. It is certain that I chattered about these things a great deal, and laid deep plans. But, as it happened, it was neither the cake nor yet my ripe years that were to make that day so memorable. I can close my eyes and go back to it unerring, and find myself in the old surroundings, familiar yet strange--strange that day with an unwonted, unaccountable strangeness. Where was everybody? The house was, indeed, still--as still as the February day outside, which lay quiet as death under a sheeted whiteness that had been drawn over it silently in the night.

I can seem to feel myself actually as little as I was then, and with my doll under one arm going up the silent stairs, laboriously but determinedly, pulling one leg resolutely after the other, up the length of them, with the aid of one hand on the banister spindles, to investigate for myself the strangeness.

An older sister of mine, whom I loved dearly, had been ill, and for several days past I had been cautioned to gentleness and had played apart, so that quietness of a certain kind I understood. But the quietness now was of a different order. In the upper hall some one opened a door, at the patter of my investigating steps, I suppose; held out a hand, stopped me in mid-search--stopped me and kissed me and told me. My sister had died in the early hours of that day, before the dawn was come.

I do not remember who it was who told me. I remember, however, pushing myself away from the embrace a little, demanding whether I might see my mother. I was told with great gentleness that this was impossible. My father? No; him, also, I might not see--not yet. All this sobered and puzzled me. I reached for the next, and perhaps on that day even dearer, possibility. Might I see the cook? Yes.

That, for a time at least, righted matters, and restored my world to me. I pattered down the stairs, down the lower hall, then more steps; found the cook and demanded my birthday cake; and in place of the cake received a most shocked look, delivered in the manner of unthinkable rebuke. When I insisted, words came to her tongue, but not concerning the cake. They dealt wholly with myself. They conveyed the impression that I had done some dreadful and wicked thing. They did not explain. I was expected to understand and repent.

I remember feeling only thoroughly outraged at having my reasonable request received in that manner. This was _my_ day, and, in honor of it, there was to have been a birthday cake. As to larger matters, they were extraneous to the subject. Of death, it should be remembered, I had absolutely no knowledge. I loved my sister to the full bent of my simple but ardent little nature, and she had been peculiarly devoted to me; but ask some one who has never seen the stars or spoken with one who has seen them, what he knows of the deep firmament: so much I knew of that night which had fallen upon our house--nothing!

What I did know presently--the information being conveyed to me in unmistakable terms by the cook--was that my birthday celebration was not to be; that it was not only jeopardized, it was clean wiped out, by an event of immensely greater moment. I have little doubt I wept sufficiently over my personal disappointment, and it may have taken especial tact on the part of the gentle person upstairs to pacify me; but by and by, with that easy forgetfulness which is the better part of childhood, I must have relinquished all hope of appropriating that day as my birthday, and accepted, in place of it, life as it was.

My parents, who twice before had been summoned to bear acute loss,--once when, before I was born, a little baby brother of mine died, and once when the life of a little baby sister had flickered out before the flame got well started,--tasted now of what must have been a far deeper bitterness. She who had gone now was their "extreme hope."

She was twenty-one when she died, and within a few months of her graduation at the University. She was brilliant above any promise given by the rest of us. I remember her very clearly--her sensitive and beautiful face, her great delicacy of body, her ready, very gentle laugh, and her unfailing understanding of all a little child's desires and moods. She was exquisite, sensitive as a mimosa in a garden of sturdier growth. Above us all she seemed to stretch delicate and flowering branches, in which the wind moved more mysterious; and lovely winged and songful things, that we could never have hoped to harbor, seemed to have made their home in her. There was in her something rare and unlooked for (I do not exaggerate), like the sudden call of a thrush in the twilight, or delicate and darkling, as in starlight the song of the nightingale. She was the one reckoned to be most like my father, and by the generous, and, I think, even proud consent of all of us, was by him the most beloved. She was as devoted as Cordelia, and with lesser cause, bringing to the happiness and fullness of his life what Lear knew only in his desolation. Since I have grown into what is at least some slight realization of what her loss must have meant to my father, I cannot touch without a trembling of tears the memory of his taking me in his arms as he did, to look upon her as she lay, white and final, delicate and done with life, there in the still and shuttered room.

But, incredible though it seems to my present knowledge, I had then no feeling of sadness whatever. She might have slept. Nor did the days that followed lay heavy hands upon me. There was a quiet stir and hushed preparation toward what I did not know, and I was looked after by neighbors or relatives to the extent of believing that a certain pleasant distinction accrued to me. In all that followed, I know that I contributed no sadness, only a child's frank observation in the face of unusual behavior of its elders.

But to return to the birthday. It was a remarkable one, you see, linked with all these things, allied to such large sorrows--a sad one and disappointing enough, you will say, for a little child. Yet I did not find it so. I was, as I have told you, indignant as to the cake, and disappointed, no doubt, that there was no happy and devoted family now gathered to hear me sing my gay little song. But to offset these there was a kind of reassurance in the day which I find it difficult to describe very exactly. It was as if, at one and the same time, this were and were not my birthday. It was my day by the calendar, but in no other way. For a birthday is one whose dawn and sunset are one's very own, a day when one's importance is admitted very gladly by a certain intimate circle. But on no day of my life, I am sure, was I of so little importance as then--a very inconsiderable little person, playing alone in the sunshine and with my song unsung. Yet something in that day shines now across the years, as distant as a star, as silver, as satisfying. That something is not to be ascribed to any one mere incident: it was compounded, no doubt, of the best of every relationship which I felt that day for the first time. The extreme gentleness of the grown-up of whom I have told you was one element; for the rest, the companionship with my father in that strange still moment in the shuttered room; the wordless love given me by my mother, of a different sort from any she had given me before; the quietness, giving me an impression as of remote spaces never dreamed of before; and, over all, the sense of something strange and of a great dignity, as of presences that moved, dread, but not unkindly.

And the little song which I had practised so faithfully, and which I was to have sung! Little as I was, and without ever being told, I believe, as the day wore on, I must have had a dim realization of how inconsiderable it was in that house where Death had taken up Life's lute, and, brows bent above it, remembered the songs that Life had sung.

II

The birthdays that followed on this one were curiously unsatisfying, though they were celebrated appropriately enough, and with the fullest respect for my importance. The anticipation and approach of them, as nearly as I can remember, were clear joy. But the days, when they arrived, overwhelmed me unaccountably. There was something disproportionate in them, so that I was glad to escape from their too personal glory to the more comfortable commonplace of the impersonal. It was as if I guessed dimly, without being in the least aware, that this display in my honor had in it something almost a little cheap--an egotism (though I had not then so much as heard the word) which contrasted unfavorably with the large and gracious and forgetful ways of Life itself.

I believe my embarrassment, my wholly unanalyzed sense of disappointment and disproportion, may have been, on a very diminutive scale, something akin to that which I am sure Joshua must have experienced,--not, mind you, at the moment of his extraordinary and flattering command,--no, but afterwards, afterwards, in the disappointed watches of the night, when he must have reflected, with disappointed amazement, that, if his senses deceived him not, he, Joshua, had made the great luminary to stand still over Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon. Something, too, of what Joseph must have experienced,--not in the enjoyable dream of his brothers' sheaves bowing down to his sheaf, and the sun and the moon and the eleven stars making their obeisance to him; nor in those long anticipatory years, when his greatness was approaching, and the scroll of the future hung loose in his hands for his remembering eye to read,--no, but in the actual moment of overwhelming fulfillment, when, from Judah to Benjamin, his brothers actually did bow down to him as ruler over all those great granaries of Egypt, and, as we are told, his mature spirit could not consent to endure so much, but "he sought where to weep, and entered into his chamber and wept there."

These are, I believe, no mere extraneous or personal experiences, but are rather of the fine weave and fabric of humanity; and the uneasiness I felt in my complacent little soul, I now believe to have been a stirring of old things, of ancient memories under the moon, which linked my little inconsiderable life, as they link all lives, to Egypt, Nilus, Babylon, and the ages that are not.

But lest this seem but vague argument and debatable territory, I would like to speak of other childhood birthdays of my own which, it seems to me, bring to the case clear evidence and important testimony.

I have said that I was one of a large family. Happily we could not make too important a matter of birthdays in our home; it would have kept us celebrating most of the time, and would have tended to make the whole year frivolous. For obvious reasons, then, birthday parties were not many. But I remember one of a most lasting glory, which had as its excuse that one of my sisters was fifteen upon the fifteenth. My mother, who by mere warmth and gayety of sympathetic temperament was forever on the watch for a reason to celebrate something, could never have missed so valid an occasion. Furniture was therefore moved out, ferns were moved in, smilax was twined about the chandeliers and strung along the portraits, a linen dancing-cloth was stretched the length of the three rooms. I can still feel the smooth glide of my strapped slippers over it. Musicians were concealed in a bosky corner. At the top of the stairs was a room known as the conservatory, whose plants had been all winter in my keeping, their condition testifying rather sadly to that fact. But now, by a lovely bounty, my sins of negligence were all wiped out. Florists came bearing pots of flowers in full blossom, and more of them and more of them. There were primroses such as my own care could never have hoped for, and fuchsias and candytuft and daffodils in full abundant bloom, even while the March winds outside yet blew so chill. In the day or two just before the fifteenth, how often I ran up into that little room and stood wordless and satisfied among them, or stooped and touched my cheek to them! Oh, the sweet heliotrope! oh, the mignonette!

On that wonderful evening there bloomed among the flowers little lights with dark red shades, and here and there comfortable seats were placed, where you could hear the music at a muted distance. We children all wore new gowns, my sister--she of the birthday--having of course, by generous consent, the filmiest and the loveliest.

That was a happy gathering if ever I saw one; and were I brought to believe that a birthday celebration is ever an affair of unmixed loveliness, I should perhaps be brought to say it concerning one for fifteen on the fifteenth. Fourteen on the fourteenth lacks flavor, is a little unripe, like fruit imported before the real season is at hand. Sixteen on the sixteenth is a little over-mellow, a little late; already childhood is gone, and youth, however lovely it may be in the receiving of homage and favors, should already have its hands outstretched rather to bestow them. But fifteen on the fifteenth! There is a golden mean and a time for all things, as the Scriptures and the fairy tales tell us. This was the time to dance, that King Solomon talks about. Like the "Tuney Bear's" soup in the old tale, this party to celebrate fifteen on the fifteenth seems to me as nearly right as things can be contrived in a world of chance like our own.

Through a maze of years and smilax I am still aware of the delicious mystery of concealed music wailing forth the Sirens waltzes (no dances were given then without the Sirens waltzes). I can see the children moving about, gay and a little fluttery; and the grown-ups, quieter, but still gay, who came to add the dignity and charm of their greeting to the celebration; and I can see my sister,--fifteen that day by a delectable distinction,--lithe and poised and gracious, and flushed and very pretty, standing beside my mother, her eyes looking out like stars under her dark hair, and her flying eyebrows that had just the slight lift of a bird's wing; and my next younger sister and I, of a less vivid coloring, no more than attendant sisters, and rich enough in that, with our new sashes and our new delight in graciousness; and my oldest sister of all, moving about with a lovely homage to us younger ones, a gracious bending down of her life to ours for a little while.

And every one, old and young, even some with gray hairs, came and bowed over the hand of fifteen. That impressed me most. And some who were a little more than guests--intimates--brought my sister gifts--one that lies here now on the table as I write: a beautifully bound small copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with the Dowden introduction. I did not know it then for what it was. I only loved it for its red and gold binding; but later, I grew up to it in my girlhood, as a young vine climbs at last to a trellis that is placed above it and awaits its growing. On its first leaf, in an exact hand, is written the date, my sister's name, and that of the donor. Then follows this wish, suitable to the day:--

"May each succeeding birthday find you as light-hearted as you are to-day."

Oh, time! time! that brings us our blunders and our tears! Was he so inexperienced himself, he who brought her that? Or did he set that down in a mere spirit of carnival and bravado, just because she _was_ fifteen on the fifteenth, and nothing else was for the moment to be admitted of any importance?

I do not know how beautiful a birthday it was for her, but oh, for me! How I loved it! How good it was to bring her my homage! How glad and willing and eager I was that she should stand first! Play, play, concealed musicians! I can still catch the plucking of the harp-strings, and the sweet gay wailing of the violins, across the years.

III

One other birthday of my childhood stands out vividly in my memory: that one on which I was twelve years old. My mother had taken us all abroad, to widen our horizons and promote our education. After a preliminary few months in England, we were established in Paris, in a comfortable apartment in a little hotel which they tell me is still there, and which went then, and still goes, by the name "Louis le Grand"--nothing less.

From the moment of our arrival, in January, I began to think even more of my birthday than was my wont. This was, no doubt, largely due to the fact that, at the distance of a few blocks one way or another, anything in the world, so it seemed, could be bought. Shops! Shops! The rue des Petits Champs, the avenue de l'Opéra, the boulevard des Italiens, were full of them. The rue des Petits Champs had innumerable _boutiques_ of all kinds--one given over to nothing, mind you, but honey and gingerbread, like a shop in a fairy tale. If you went across the Place Vendôme and followed the rue Castiglione, you came to the most romantic shops of all, there under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli, beginning with the most delectable pastry shop in the world on the very corner. You could walk there on a sunny day, disdainful of the weather, with the Gardens of the Tuileries opposite you, and feast your soul on the varied displays.

But when all was said, there was nothing that could be compared with the shops of the rue de la Paix. Here you came at once into a richer atmosphere. Here, mainly, were jewel-shops, displaying tiaras and necklaces--"rings and things and fine array." Dolls and gingerbread and honey were delightful--let me not seem to undervalue them; but to stand looking on while a master of his profession leaned over a velvet counter to show my mother brooches of jewels, and diamonds set in rings, was to know from the standpoint of childhood some of the true elevations of life.

While my mother considered jewels set thus or so, my eyes roved, speculative, among the rich wares. I had been brought up in too old-fashioned a way to make any mistake as to my limitations. Well-bred children, it was understood, wore neither rings nor ornaments, unless one or two of a most positive simplicity. But watches there were, a bewildering variety--for we were in the shop of one Victor Fleury, who, among other distinctions that I doubt not he had, was "Horloger de la Marine." You can imagine whether he had watches! I called my mother's attention to the beauty of them, some very small ones in particular. She looked at them, but made no comment. I deduced that it was not well-bred for a little girl of twelve to wear a watch.

My birthday dawned at last. I was kissed and wished many happy returns, and was told that there was to be a dinner that night especially for me, and that I would then receive my gifts. The hotel was a small one. Dinner would be served for the hotel guests a trifle earlier, so that they might the sooner leave the way clear for me. This had been proposed by Madame Blet herself, the proprietress, and was intended no doubt for a fine piece of hospitality. For me the strict hotel rules were to be slackened; the fine democracy of hotel life, where one guest is as good as another, if he but pay his account, was to be overruled in my favor; for me the sun was to be advanced, and the moon set at a new pace in the heavens!

It was very grand in anticipation, I can assure you. To be twelve was of itself no inconsiderable glory, but to be twelve under such flattering conditions! I resolved to write an account of all this to my two chums in America. Little girls they were, of my own age, but of a less colored experience. They should have news of these matters. They should be enlightened as to the importance of her with whom they had commonly played visiting-lady and jackstones.

Yet, as the evening drew near, old stirrings of uneasiness made themselves felt dimly, dimly--something, I cannot tell you what, moving on the face of undiscovered waters; a distrust, a shyness and embarrassment that had nothing to do with timidity; a dim sense of disproportion, I take it to have been, and of ancient human questionings.

We waited a little past the usual hour, and then there came a knock. Joseph, our waiter, appeared and bowed gravely. "Mademoiselle, le dîner est servi."

My heart rose and fluttered. Presently we all went down the hall and down the red carpeted stairs, I with my hand in my mother's. I can still feel it resting there. Down the steps we went, my mother and I--I with a little delighted pause and poise at each step, the rest following like a court train. Twelve, and the youngest! Twelve, and the well-beloved and proud! Blow, bugles, fine and high! and let those who follow wear scarlet! What more could a little girl ask?

I do not know; I cannot tell you. I only know that, though I would not have admitted it for worlds at the time, when I found myself in the midst of the happiness it was no longer happiness exactly. Not, you understand, that I would have relinquished any of the splendor then. It fascinated me, of course.