Part 12

Joseph held the door open; a fine heraldic gesture--the flat of his palm against it, the fingers spread, his head flung back, his eyes tributary ahead of him; his whole pose saying, "Stand back! She comes!" Several of the other servants were there, grouped to see and to attend. Madame Blet, in her black dress and perpetual shoulder-cape--a sad-faced, very dignified woman, with the sadness set aside in my honor for that evening and positive brightness shining from her kind eyes,--stood there too, with welcoming glances. She had decorated the table herself: there it was, a delight of soft lights and snowy linen, wonderful possibilities and flowers.

The dining-room was empty yet bright, as are the heavens for the coming of the moon. Joseph stood, not back of my mother's chair, as usual, but back of mine, to see me seated. Those faces, very beloved in the soft light, were turned toward me, a little gay, and happy wholly in my happiness. It was fulfillment of all the dreams of importance I might ever have had.

Then came the unfolding of the gifts. Any one who knew my mother must know that, in the smallest of a nest of lovely little boxes,--just enough of them to produce a certain curiosity and delay, to enhance the final delight,--lay the most lovely little watch, silver-cased (to render it more conformable to my age), and marked with the initials of my name; while on its inner casing it bore proudly, as it still bears, while it ticks here on my table, this inscription: _Victor Fleury, Horloger de la Marine, 23, Rue de la Paix, 23, Paris_.

After the other gifts were opened dinner was served, Joseph bringing everything first to me, whose place it was usually to be served last of all. There were special dishes, and the lamb chops had on particularly fine cravats, and the _petits pois_ were so very _petits_ that it seemed nearly a shame to eat them--like "good little Tootle-tum Teh" in the ballad; and there were side dishes, very special, for the occasion.

Then, as a crowning glory, a dessert not baked in a hotel oven at all; no cabinet pudding of frequent occurrence, nothing that hinted of rice or raisins; no, but something fetched particularly from the _pâtisserie_. By the look of it, it might have been, and probably was, concocted by a pastry cook in full regalia, in that superlative _pâtisserie_ on the rue de Rivoli, opposite the Louvre.

It was a tower made of a hard brown candy flecked with chopped nuts. It had a door in it, and windows with embrasures at the tops to make you think of King Arthur and his knights. It was decorated on its platter by saccharine approaches. The tower was open at the top and filled with a flavored whipped cream. Madame Blet, who had, I doubt not, been directing forces from the kitchen, stood now in the doorway beaming like another candle. This, which had the added flavor of being a surprise even to my mother, was Madame Blet's gift to the little American mademoiselle. Once more, on a most diminutive scale, France and America were exchanging courtesies.

But meanwhile,--oh, inevitable!--Joseph, that devoted ambassador, beaming unfeigned pride in the behavior of his country, held the tower at my left hand. I was to serve myself first. But how--I ask the heavens to answer me this!--how is one to serve one's self to a feudal tower? One desperate glance at my mother,--the quick dart of an alarmed swallow,--then I took up the large spoon and laid it hesitatingly against the tower's side. But the tower was nearly as hard as the rock it represented. The approaches, also, were of one piece. With a mere dessert spoon, what can be done as to a portcullis! Shall you, do you think, carry off a drawbridge with a slight silver instrument to be held in one hand? I was not meeting the emergency. I was not equal to the occasion. This I knew, with quick intolerable shame. What was to be done? At last, after what seemed to me ages, I accepted the only possibility. I scooped from the top of the tower some of the fluffy whipped cream, put this on my plate and the spoon back among the approaches; and the tower, proud, unspoiled, unwon, was carried on to the others, who served themselves, as I had done; or, when the cream was at last too low for them to reach, suffered Joseph to scoop it out for them and put it on their plates.

I sat tasting the whipped cream on the end of my spoon, and oh, it was insipid, that faint froth; not of itself, but by contrast with what I would have wished--a portcullis at the very least. When we left the dining-room, it still stood solid and invulnerable, that so desirable tower, a delusion to the palate, a snare to the understanding, a subtle but strong disappointment to the heart! Now that I look back on it, it seems like an unintended symbol, an uninterpreted writing on the wall of my childhood.

These things called birthdays seemed for me to have been weighed that night in subtle scales, and found wanting. Froth on the tip of your spoon! The real anticipated glory, a chimera; the dreamed-of and so-much-desired happiness, a thing which could not be won, a thing left untouched while one slipped away unsatisfied, disappointed, into the later years.

No doubt I passed on to later years that very evening as I went out of the lighted dining-room; for more and more this centralizing of power and importance, even though it were for one day of the year only, became to me incongruous and out of the real order of life. As I began to gauge values and proportions better, it came to seem almost a gentle buffoonery. The mild distrust I had felt for birthdays in my little girlhood was beginning to take on the form of positive distaste.

Doubtless I was beginning to have a larger vision of life. For one thing, I had meanwhile seen dawns rise over the Alps, and day depart from the fruitful purple valleys to ascend the heights, beautiful, like the feet of those upon the mountains, who bring tidings of peace; and had watched them pause in their glory for a last look upon the work of their hands before going forth forever beyond the world's edge. And I had stood since then by the incredible sounding sea; I had known that sense of the waters in the hollow of His hand, and watched the night bend like the face of infinity over it.

IV

Out of the birthdays I have known, I have recorded but three--the three made memorable, not so much by material as by spiritual gifts, and by some vision of life itself vouchsafed me. It was as if, with a touch upon my hand, Life summoned me to note, even though in some unrealized way, when I was but a child of five, how inconsiderable may be these our little personal joys and expectations and vanities of song, even as were mine, in the face of the large solemnities and griefs and remembered joys with which, that day, our home was visited. And on that second birthday, it was as if Life bade me note how satisfying to the heart is the gift of lovely and willing service. Not mine the day at all; but I can remember, all woven in with the ravishing music of harps and violins, a sense of my almost thrilled delight in the service that others brought my sister, in whose honor we were glad, and a high joy in my own eager and devoted homage. Dimly seen in all this, though I could not have named it to you then, was a larger vision, no doubt, of this same truth translated into lovelier and more solemn meaning; as if in those lighted rooms, gay with their smilax and their laughter, Life had suddenly laid a touch on my shoulder, and with her finger on her lips had bade me note how sweet is the odor of spikenard, and how thrillingly beautiful are the broken pieces of alabaster.

And the third birthday? Perhaps it was then that Life put into my hand a better gift than any--that larger knowledge, which all the coming years were to corroborate, that to have special gifts and benefits for one's self which are not for others, let the glamour be what it may, is after all but froth and disappointment; and that only the blending of one's life with other lives can ever really satisfy the heart.

Since then I have seen birthdays of my own and others not a few, and have looked on at those of many a child. Witnessing these, I have sometimes been troubled to note how--materialists ourselves--we insist upon making materialists of our children also. For who has not beheld a little lad, triumphant as Jack Horner, in the midst of his birthday packages, or a little Midas, among his heaped-up Christmas toys, appropriating to himself, with our delighted consent, the Other Child's birthday also. With what shameful abundance of material gifts do we heap the little eager hands; but how few, how few, for the young and growing spirit!

Yet it is to be noted hopefully that our too personal celebrations are apt to fall away, as it were of themselves, in our later years; and doubtless with them many of our central egotisms, life correcting with a patient hand our dull and ofttimes willful behavior. I cannot be persuaded that it is solely a sensitiveness to the loss of youth that prompts us to waive or disregard those birthdays which fall upon the nether side of twenty. Our neglect of them is more often, I like to believe, in the order of a gentle disavowal of old egotisms, as life ripens and takes on in our regard an aspect larger and less personal; even as to a nation or a religion which progresses, egotism and special privilege become increasingly distasteful, and the idea of a chosen people more and more intolerable to the pure in heart, as the world matures.

Mature life, like the mature heart, cannot endure a sovereignty over its brethren, but longs for the old original levels; sheds its singleness and its superiorities. We become, God be thanked, less considerable under the moon as time advances; more of a piece with life; better blended with the days; a part of all dawns and sunsets--we who before had but one of each to our credit.

"I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of a day besides my dinner," says Lamb. "I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts--a grace before Milton--a grace before Shakespeare--a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the 'Fairy Queen'?"

I own also to a disposition to celebrate many birthdays rather than one, and am inclined to be thankful on twenty other occasions in the course of the year besides that one which falls so personally for me--even if so negligible--on a certain February morning. I confess to a love of calendars that sometimes give me two or three great names to celebrate in a single day; nor am I ashamed to admit that the sun rises for me the statelier if it be upon an anniversary which commemorates Camoens or Michael Angelo. It has long been my habit, to celebrate quietly in my heart, when all the birds are singing, that day in April when, it is said,--uncertainly enough,--Shakespeare came to the earth; nor have I failed often to note that other day also, when, impartially in the same April weather, it is said, he--and Cervantes on the same day with him--departed from it.

And if such remembrances as these may seem still to tend toward egotism, yet I think that claim can hardly be proved valid. For these,--celebrate them as personally as we may,--these are not men of one season but of all time, blended with all days, impartially a part of all weathers, and of the very fibre and lives of most of us; and, even though we should forget them, yet memorably forgotten in those unforgettable companionships that they have bestowed upon us. These are our stars and moons, differing in glory one from another, with which, in the midst of our mortality, we answer, not ignobly, the shining challenge of the stars; these are they innumerable whose beauties and nobilities, coupled with our own inconsiderable lives, lend at last some glory to our days so frail, so ephemeral.

As a child, I used to love to count the stars, beginning with the very first one that pricked its way through the twilit blue, and by a pretty conceit always called that first one my own, and put a most personal wish upon it. For a long time it always stood single in the heavens, and then another here or there, and there, and there, appeared, which I counted with delight. But always the moment came when the count was irretrievably lost; when stars bloomed, not by ones and twos, but by myriads, no more to be counted than the unnumbered sands of the sea; and over me was stretched the jeweled beauty of the infinite heavens, just breathing with the breathing of the night; and I, looking up glorified into that beauty, a little inconsiderable child, standing beside the soft dark shadow of the cypresses.

THE END

Transcriber's Notes

Errors in punctuation have been fixed.

Page 172: "Superflous precaution" changed to "Superfluous precaution"