Chapter 2

“I have scarcely been out of my room since spring, until recently,” replied Jessie. “Thank you, my dear” (to the little girl); “but Dr. Sanford has done wonders for me. How is your health now, Mrs. Fellows?”

“I have not been so well an entire summer in ten years. My daughter, Mrs. Tarbox, was saying the other day that she wished she had my strength. You know she is quite delicate,” said Mary.

“Speaking of Dr. Sanford,” said Henry, looking at Jessie, “he is really a remarkable man. My son has such confidence in him that he seemed quite relieved when I had passed my grand climacteric and could get on his list. You know he takes no one under sixty-three. By the way, governor,” he added, turning around with some ado, so as to face George, “I heard he had been treating your rheumatism lately. Has he seemed to reach the difficulty?”

“Remarkably,” replied George, tenderly stroking his right knee in an absent manner. “Why, don't you think I walked half the way home from my office the other day when my carriage was late?”

“I wonder you dared venture it,” said Jessie, with a shocked air. “What if you had met with some accident!”

“That's what my son said,” answered George. “He made me promise never to try such a thing again; but I like to show them occasionally that I'm good for something yet.”

He said this with a “he, he,” of senile complacency, ending in an asthmatic cough, which caused some commotion in the company. Frank got up and slapped him on the back, and Mary sent Annie for a glass of water.

George being relieved, and quiet once more restored, Henry said to Frank:--

“By the way, doctor, I want to congratulate you on your son's last book. You must have helped him to the material for so truthful a picture of American manners in the days when we were young. I fear we have not improved much since then. There was a simplicity, a naturalness in society fifty years ago, that one looks in vain for now. There was, it seems to me, much less regard paid to money, and less of morbid social ambition. Don't you think so, Mrs. Tyrrell?”

“It's just what I was saying only the other day,” replied Nellie. “I'm sure I don't know what we 're coming to nowadays. Girls had some modesty when I was young,” and she shook her head with its rows of white curls with an air of mingled reprobation and despair.

“Did you attend Professor Merryweather's lecture last evening, Mrs. Hyde?” asked Frank, adjusting his eye-glasses and fixing Jessie with that intensity of look by which old persons have to make up for their failing eyesight. “The hall was so near your house, I did n't know but you would feel like venturing out.”

“My daughters insisted on my taking advantage of the opportunity, it is so seldom I go anywhere of an evening,” replied Jessie, “and I was very much interested, though I lost a good deal owing to the carrying on of a young couple in front of me. When I was a girl, young folks didn't do their courting in public.”

Mary had not heard of the lecture, and Frank explained that it was one of the ter-semi-centennial course on American society and politics fifty years ago.

“By the way,” remarked George, “did you observe what difficulty they are having in finding enough survivors of the civil war to make a respectable squad. The papers say that not over a dozen of both armies can probably be secured, and some of the cases are thought doubtful at that.”

“Is it possible!” said Henry. “And yet, too, it must be so; but it sounds strangely to one who remembers as if it were yesterday seeing the grand review of the Federal armies at Washington just after the war. What a host of strong men was that, and now scarcely a dozen left. My friends, we are getting to be old people. We are almost through with it.”

Henry sat gazing into vacancy over the tops of his spectacles, while the old ladies wiped theirs and sniffed and sighed a little. Finally Jessie said:--

“Those were heroic days. My little granddaughters never tire of hearing stories about them. They are strong partisans, too. Jessie is a fierce little rebel and Sam is an uncompromising Unionist, only they both agree in denouncing slavery.”

“That reminds me,” said Frank, smiling, “that our little Frankie came to me yesterday with a black eye he got for telling Judge Benson's little boy that people of his complexion were once slaves. He had read it in his history, and appealed to me to know if it was n't true.”

“I 'm not a bit surprised that the little Benson boy resented the imputation,” said George. “I really don't believe that more than half the people would be certain that slavery ever existed here, and I 'm sure that it rarely occurs to those who do know it. No doubt that company of old slaves at the centennial--that is, if they can find enough survivors--will be a valuable historical reminder to many.”

“Dr. Hays,” said Nellie, “will you settle a question between Mrs. Hyde and myself? Were you in C------, it was then only a village, along between 1870 and '80, about forty or fifty years ago?”

“No--and yet, come to think--let me see--when did you say?” replied Frank doubtfully.

“Between 1870 and '80, as nearly as we can make out, probably about the middle of the decade,” said Nellie.

“I think I was in C------ at about that time. I believe I was still living with my father's family.”

“I told you so,” said Nellie to Jessie, and, turning again to Frank, she asked:--

“Do you remember anything about a social club there?”

“I do,” replied Frank, with some appearance of interest. “I recall something of the sort quite distinctly, though I suppose I have n't thought of it for twenty years. How did you ever hear of it, Mrs. Hyde?”

“Why, I was a member,” replied she briskly, “and so was Mrs. Tyrrell. We were reminded of it the other day by a discovery Mrs. Tyrrell made in an old bureau drawer of a photograph of the members of the club in a group, taken probably all of fifty years ago, and yellow as you can imagine. There was one figure that resembled you, doctor, as you might have looked then, and I thought, too, that I recalled you as one of the members; but Mrs. Tyrrell could not, and so we agreed to settle the matter by appealing to your own recollection.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Frank, “I now recall the club very perfectly, and it seems to me Governor Townsley was also in it.”

“Yes, I think I was a member,” assented George, “though my recollections are rather hazy.”

Mary and Henry, being appealed to, failed to remember anything about the club, the latter suggesting that probably it flourished before he came to C------. Jessie was quite sure she recalled Henry, but the others could not do so with much positiveness.

“I will ask Mrs. Long when I get home,” said Henry. “She has always lived at C------, and is great for remembering dates. Let's see; what time do you think it was?”

“Mrs. Tyrrell and I concluded it must have been between. 1873 and 1877,” said Jessie; adding slyly, “for she was married in 1877. Mrs. Tyrrell, did you bring that old photograph with you? It might amuse them to look at it.”

Nellie produced a small picture, and, adjusting their spectacles and eye-glasses, they all came forward to see it. A group of six young people was represented, all in the very heyday of youth. The spectators were silent, looking first at the picture, and then at each other.

“Can it be,” said Frank, “that these were ever our pictures? I hope, Mrs. Tyrrell, the originals had the forethought to put the names on the back, that we may be able to identify them.”

“No,” said she, “we must guess as best we can. First, who is that?” pointing to one of the figures.

“That must be Mrs. Hyde, for she is taller than the others,” suggested Grandma Fellows.

“By the same token, that must be Mrs. Tyrrell, for she is shorter,” said Jessie; “though, but for that, I don't see how we could have told them apart.”

“How oddly they did dress in those days!” said Mary.

“Who can that be?” asked Frank, pointing to the finest-looking of the three young men. “If that is one of us, there was more choice in our looks than there is now,--eh, Townsley?”

“No doubt,” said George, “fifty years ago somebody's eye scanned those features with a very keen sense of proprietorship. What a queer feeling it would have given those young things to have anticipated that we should ever puzzle over their identities in this way!”

They finally agreed on the identity of Jessie, Nellie, and Frank, and of George also, on his assuring them that he was once of slender figure. This left two figures which nobody could recognize, though Jessie insisted that the gentleman was Henry, and Mary thought the other young lady was a Miss Fellows, a girl of the village, who, she explained, had died young many, many years ago.

“Don't you remember her?” she asked them, and her voice trembled with a half-genuine sort of self-pity, as if, for a moment, she imagined herself her own ghost.

“I recall her well,” said Frank; “tall, grave, sweet, I remember she used to realize to me the abstraction of moral beauty when we were studying Paley together.”

“I don't know when I have thought so much of those days as since I received cards for your golden wedding, Judge,” said Nellie to Henry, soon after. “How many of those who were present at your wedding will be present at your golden wedding, do you suppose?”

“Not more than two or three,” replied Henry, “and yet the whole village was at the wedding.”

“Thank God,” he said a moment after, “that our friends scatter before they die. Otherwise old people like us would do nothing but attend funerals during the last half of our lives. Parting is sad, but I prefer to part from my friends while they are yet alive, that I may feel it less when they die. One must manage his feelings or they will get the better of him.”

“It is a singular sensation,” said George, “to outlive one's generation. One has at times a guilty sense of having deserted his comrades. It seems natural enough to outlive any one contemporary, but unnatural to survive them as a mass,--a sort of risky thing, fraught with the various vague embarrassments and undefined perils threatening one who is out of his proper place. And yet one does n't want to die, though convinced he ought to, and that's the cowardly misery of it.”

“Yes,” said Henry, “I had that feeling pretty strongly when I attended the last reunion of our alumni, and found not one survivor within five classes of me. I was isolated. Death had got into my rear and cut me off. I felt ashamed and thoroughly miserable.”

Soon after, tea was served. Frank vindicated his character as an old beau by a tottering alacrity in serving the ladies, while George and Henry, by virtue of their more evident infirmity, sat still and allowed themselves to be served. One or two declined tea as not agreeing with them at that hour.

The loquacious herb gave a fresh impulse to the conversation, and the party fell to talking in a broken, interjectory way of youthful scenes and experiences, each contributing some reminiscence, and the others chiming in and adding scraps, or perhaps confessing their inability to recall the occurrences.

“What a refinement of cruelty it is,” said Henry at last, “that makes even those experiences which were unpleasant or indifferent when passing look so mockingly beautiful when hopelessly past.”

“Oh, that's not the right way to look at it, Judge,” broke in Grandma Fellows, with mild reproof. “Just think rather how dull life would be, looking forward or backward, if past or coming experiences seemed as uninteresting as they mostly are when right at hand.”

“Sweet memories are like moonlight,” said Jessie musingly. “They make one melancholy, however pleasing they may be. I don't see why, any more than why moonlight is so sad, spite of its beauty; but so it is.”

The fragile tenure of the sense of personal identity is illustrated by the ease and completeness with which actors can put themselves in the place of the characters they assume, so that even their instinctive demeanor corresponds to the ideal, and their acting becomes nature. Such was the experience of the members of the club. The occupation of their mind during the week with the study of their assumed characters had produced an impression that had been deepened to an astonishing degree by the striking effect of the accessories of costume and manner. The long-continued effort to project themselves mentally into the period of old age was assisted in a startling manner by the illusion of the senses produced by the decrepit figures, the sallow and wrinkled faces, and the white heads of the group.

Their acting had become spontaneous. They were perplexed and bewildered as to their identity, and in a manner carried away by the illusion their own efforts had created. In some of the earlier conversation of the evening there had been occasional jests and personalities, but the talk had now become entirely serious. The pathos and melancholy of the retrospections in which they were indulging became real. All felt that if it was acting now, it was but the rehearsal of a coming reality. I think some of them were for a little while not clearly conscious that it was not already reality, and that their youth was not forever vanished. The sense of age was weighing on them like a nightmare. In very self-pity voices began to tremble and bosoms heaved with suppressed sobs.

Mary rose and stepped to the piano. It indicated how fully she had realized her part that, as she passed the mirror, no involuntary start testified to surprise at the aged figure it reflected. She played in a minor key an air to the words of Tennyson's matchless piece of pathos, --

“The days that are no more,” accompanying herself with a voice rich, strong, and sweet. By the time she had finished, the girls were all crying.

Suddenly Henry sprang to his feet, and, with the strained, uncertain voice of one waking himself from a nightmare, cried:--

“Thank God, thank God, it is only a dream,” and tore off the wig, letting the brown hair fall about his forehead. Instantly all followed his example, and in a moment the transformation was effected. Brown, black, and golden hair was flying free; rosy cheeks were shining through the powder where handkerchiefs had been hastily applied, and the bent and tottering figures of a moment ago had given place to broad-shouldered men and full-breasted girls. Henry caught Jessie around the waist, Frank Nellie, and George Mary, and with one of the little girls at the piano, up and down the room they dashed to the merriest of waltzes in the maddest round that ever was danced. There was a reckless abandon in their glee, as if the lust of life, the glow and fire of youth, its glorious freedom, and its sense of boundless wealth, suddenly set free, after long repression, had intoxicated them with its strong fumes. It was such a moment as their lifetime would not bring again.

It was not till, flushed and panting, laughing and exhausted, they came to a pause, that they thought of Grandma Fellows. She was crying, and yet smiling through her tears.

“Oh, grandma,” cried Mary, throwing her arms around her, and bursting into tears, “we can't take you back with us. Oh, dear.”

And the other girls cried over her, and kissed her in a piteous, tender way, feeling as if their hearts would break for the pity of it. And the young men were conscious of moisture about the eyes as they stood looking on.

But Grandma Fellows smiled cheerily, and said:--

“I'm a foolish old woman to cry, and you mustn't think it is because I want to be young again. It's only because I can't help it.”

Perhaps she could n't have explained it better.