Title: The Old Folks' Party - 1898
Author: Bellamy, Edward, 1850-1898
Language: English
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THE OLD FOLKS' PARTY

By Edward Bellamy

1898


"And now what shall we do next Wednesday evening?" said Jessie Hyde, in
a business-like tone. "It is your turn, Henry, to suggest."

Jessie was a practical, energetic young lady, whose blue eyes never
relapsed into the dreaminess to which that color is subject. She
furnished the "go" for the club. Especially she furnished the "go" for
Henry Long, who had lots of ideas, but without her to stir him up was as
dull as a flint without a steel.

There were six in the club, and all were present to-night in Jessie's
parlor. The evening had been given to a little music, a little dancing,
a little card-playing, and a good deal of talking. It was near the hour
set by the club rule for the adjournment of its reunions, and the party
had drawn their chairs together to consult upon the weekly recurring
question, what should be done at the next meeting by way of special
order of amusement. The programmes were alternately reading, singing,
dancing, whist; varied with evenings of miscellaneous sociality like
that which had just passed. The members took turns in suggesting
recreations. To-night it was Henry Long's turn, and to him accordingly
the eyes of the group turned at Jessie's question.

"Let's have an old folks' party," was his answer.

Considering that all of the club were yet at ages when they celebrated
their birthdays with the figure printed on the cake, the suggestion
seemed sufficiently irrelevant.

"In that case," said Frank Hays, "we shall have to stay at home."

Frank was an alert little fellow, with a jaunty air, to whom, by tacit
consent, all the openings for jokes were left, as he had a taste that
way.

"What do you mean, Henry?" inquired George Townsley, a thick-set, sedate
young man, with an intelligent, but rather phlegmatic look.

"My idea is this," said Henry, leaning back in his chair, with his hands
clasped behind his head, and his long legs crossed before him. "Let us
dress up to resemble what we expect to look like fifty years hence, and
study up our demeanor to correspond with what we expect to be and feel
like at that time, and just call on Mary next Wednesday evening to talk
over old times, and recall what we can, if anything, of our vanished
youth, and the days when we belonged to the social club at C------."

The others seemed rather puzzled in spite of the explanation. Jessie sat
looking at Henry in a brown study as she traced out his meaning.

"You mean a sort of ghost party," said she finally; "ghosts of the
future, instead of ghosts of the past."

"That's it exactly," answered he. "Ghosts of the future are the only
sort worth heeding. Apparitions of things past are a very unpractical
sort of demonology, in my opinion, compared with apparitions of things
to come."

"How in the world did such an odd idea come into your head?" asked
pretty Nellie Tyrrell, whose dancing black eyes were the most piquant
of interrogation points, with which it was so delightful to be punctured
that people were generally slow to gratify her curiosity.

"I was beginning a journal this afternoon," said Henry, "and the idea of
Henry Long, aetat. seventy, looking over the leaves, and wondering about
the youth who wrote them so long ago, came up to my mind."

Henry's suggestion had set them all thinking, and the vein was so
unfamiliar that they did not at once find much to say.

"I should think," finally remarked George, "that such an old folks'
party would afford a chance for some pretty careful study, and some
rather good acting."

"Fifty years will make us all not far from seventy. What shall we look
like then, I wonder?" musingly asked Mary Fellows.

She was the demurest, dreamiest of the three girls; the most of a woman,
and the least of a talker. She had that poise and repose of manner which
are necessary to make silence in company graceful.

"We may be sure of one thing, anyhow, and that is, that we shall not
look and feel at all as we do now," said Frank. "I suppose," he added,
"if, by a gift of second sight, we could see tonight, as in a glass,
what we shall be at seventy, we should entirely fail to recognize
ourselves, and should fall to disputing which was which."

"Yes, and we shall doubtless have changed as much in disposition as in
appearance," added Henry. "Now, for one, I 've no idea what sort of a
fellow my old man will turn out. I don't believe people can generally
tell much better what sort of old people will grow out of them than what
characters their children will have. A little better, perhaps, but not
much. Just think how different sets of faculties and tastes develop and
decay, come into prominence and retire into the background, as the years
pass. A trait scarcely noticeable in youth tinges the whole man in age."

"What striking dramatic effects are lost because the drama of life is
spun out so long instead of having the ends brought together," observed
George. "The spectators lose the force of the contrasts because they
forget the first part of every rôle before the latter part is reached.
One fails in consequence to get a realizing sense of the sublime
inconsistencies of every lifetime."

"That difficulty is what we propose, in a small way, to remedy next
Wednesday night," replied Henry.

Mary professed some scruples. It was so queer, she thought it must be
wrong. It was like tempting Providence to take for granted issues in his
hands, and masquerade with uncreated things like their own yet unborn
selves. But Frank reminded her that the same objection would apply to
any arrangement as to what they should do next week.

"Well, but," offered Jessie, "is it quite respectful to make sport of
old folks, even if they are ourselves?"

"My conscience is clear on that point," said Frank. "It's the only way
we can get even with them for the deprecating, contemptuous way in which
they will allude to us over their snuff and tea, as callow and flighty
youth, if indeed they deign to remember us at all, which is n't likely."

"I 'm all tangled up in my mind," said Nellie, with an air of
perplexity, "between these old people you are talking about and
ourselves. Which is which? It seems odd to talk of them in the third
person, and of ourselves in the first. Are n't they ourselves too?"

"If they are, then certainly we are not," replied Henry. "You may take
your choice.

"The fact is," he added, as she looked still more puzzled, "there are
half-a dozen of each one of us, or a dozen if you please, one in fact
for each epoch of life, and each slightly or almost wholly different
from the others. Each one of these epochs is foreign and inconceivable
to the others, as ourselves at seventy now are to us. It's as hard to
suppose ourselves old as to imagine swapping identities with another.
And when we get old it will be just as hard to realize that we were
ever young. So that the different periods of life are to all intents and
purposes different persons, and the first person of grammar ought to
be used only with the present tense. What we were, or shall be, or do,
belongs strictly to the third person."

"You would make sad work of grammar with that notion," said Jessie,
smiling.

"Grammar needs mending just there," replied Henry. "The three persons of
grammar are really not enough. A fourth is needed to distinguish the
ego of the past and future from the present ego, which is the only true
one."

"Oh, you're getting altogether too deep for me," said Jessie. "Come,
girls, what in the world are we going to get to wear next Wednesday?"

"Sure enough!" cried they with one accord, while the musing look in
their eyes gave place to a vivacious and merry expression.

"My mother is n't near as old as we 're going to be. Her things won't
do," said Nellie.

"Nor mine," echoed Jessie; "but perhaps Mary's grandmother will let us
have some of her things."

"In that case," suggested Frank, "it will be only civil to invite her to
the party."

"To be sure, why not?" agreed Jessie. "It is to be an 'old folks'
party, and her presence will give a reality to the thing."

"I don't believe she 'll come," said George. "You see being old is dead
earnest to her, and she won't see the joke."

But Mary said she would ask her anyway, and so that was settled.

"My father is much too large in the waist for his clothes to be of any
service to me," said George lugubriously.

But Frank reminded him that this was a hint as to his get-up, and that
he must stuff with pillows that the proverb might be fulfilled, "Like
father like son."

And then they were rather taken aback by Henry's obvious suggestion that
there was no telling what the fashion in dress would be in a. d. 1925,
"even if," he added, "the scientists leave us any A. D. by that time,"
though Frank remarked here that a. d. would answer just as well as _Anno
Darwinis_, if worst came to worst. But it was decided that there was no
use trying after prophetical accuracy in dress, since it was out of
the question, and even if attainable would not suggest age to their own
minds as would the elderly weeds which they were accustomed to see.

"It's rather odd, is n't it," said Jessie gravely, "that it did n't
occur to anybody that in all probability not over one or two of us at
most will be alive fifty years hence."

"Let's draw lots for the two victims, and the rest of us will appear as
ghosts," suggested Frank grimly.

"Poor two," sighed Nellie. "I 'm sorry for them. How lonely they will
be. I'm glad I have n't got a very good constitution."

But Henry remarked that Jessie might have gone further and said just as
truly that none of them would survive fifty years, or even ten.

"We may, some of us, escape the pang of dying as long as that," said he,
"but that is but a trifle, and not a necessary incident of death. The
essence of mortality is change, and we shall be changed. Ten years will
see us very different persons. What though an old dotard calling himself
Henry Long is stumping around fifty years hence, what is that to me? I
shall have been dead a half century by that time."

"The old gentleman you speak so lightly of will probably think more
tenderly of you than you do of him," said Jessie.

"I don't believe it," answered Henry. "In fact, if we were entirely true
to nature next Wednesday, it would spoil the fun, for we probably should
not, if actually of the age we pretend, think of our youth once a year,
much less meet to talk it over."

"Oh, I don't think so," protested Nellie. "I 'm sure all the story-books
and poetry say that old folks are much given to reviewing their youth in
a pensive, regretful sort of way."

"That's all very pretty, but it 's all gammon in my opinion," responded
Henry. "The poets are young people who know nothing of how old folks
feel, and argue only from their theory of the romantic fitness of
things. I believe that reminiscence takes up a very small part of old
persons' time. It would furnish them little excitement, for they have
lost the feelings by which their memories would have to be interpreted
to become vivid. Remembering is dull business at best. I notice that
most persons, even of eventful lives, prefer a good novel to the
pleasures of recollection. It is really easier to sympathize with the
people in a novel or drama than with our past selves. We lose a
great source of recreation just because we can't recall the past more
vividly."

"How shockingly Henry contradicts to-night," was the only reply Nellie
deigned to this long speech.

"What shall we call each other next Wednesday?" asked Mary. "By our
first names, as now?"

"Not if we are going to be prophetically accurate," said Henry. "Fifty
years hence, in all probability, we shall, most of us, have altogether
forgotten our present intimacies and formed others, quite inconceivable
now. I can imagine Frank over there, scratching his bald head with his
spectacle tips, and trying to recall me. 'Hen. Long, Hen. Long,--let
me think; name sounds familiar, and yet I can't quite place him. Did n't
I know him at C------, or was it at college? Bless me, how forgetful I
'm growing!'"

They all laughed at Henry's bit of acting. Perhaps it was only sparkles
of mirth, but it might have been glances of tender confidence that shot
between certain pairs of eyes betokening something that feared not
time. This is in no sort a love story, but such things can't be wholly
prevented.

The girls, however, protested that this talk about growing so utterly
away from each other was too dismal for anything, and they would n't
believe it anyhow. The old-fashioned notions about eternal constancy
were ever so much nicer. It gave them the cold shivers to hear Henry's
ante-mortem dissection of their friendship, and that young man was
finally forced to admit that the members of the club would probably
prove exceptions to the general rule in such matters. It was agreed,
therefore, that they should appear to know each other at the old folks'
party.

"All you girls must, of course, be called 'Mrs.' instead of 'Miss,'"
suggested Frank, "though you will have to keep your own names, that
is, unless you prefer to disclose any designs you may have upon other
people's; "for which piece of impertinence Nellie, who sat next him,
boxed his ears,--for the reader must know that these young people were
on a footing of entire familiarity and long intimacy.

"Do you know what time it is?" asked Mary, who, by virtue of the sweet
sedateness of her disposition, was rather the monitress of the company.

"It's twelve o'clock, an hour after the club's curfew."

"Well," remarked Henry, rousing from the fit of abstraction in which he
had been pursuing the subject of their previous discussion, "it was to
be expected we should get a little mixed as to chronology over such talk
as this."

"With our watches set fifty years ahead, there 'll be no danger of
overstaying our time next Wednesday, anyhow," added Frank.

Soon the girls presented themselves in readiness for outdoors, and, in a
pleasant gust of good-bys and parting jests, the party broke up.

"Good-by for fifty years," Jessie called after them from the stoop, as
the merry couples walked away in the moonlight.

The following week was one of numerous consultations among the girls.
Grandmother Fellows's wardrobe was pretty thoroughly rummaged under that
good-natured old lady's superintendence, and many were the queer effects
of old garments upon young figures which surprised the steady-going
mirror in her quiet chamber.

"I 'm afraid I can never depend on it again," said Mrs. Fellows.'

She had promised to be at the party.

"She looked so grave when I first asked her," Mary explained to the
girls, "that I was sorry I spoke of it. I was afraid she thought we
wanted her only as a sort of convenience, to help out our pantomime by
the effect of her white hair. But in a minute she smiled in her cheery
way, and said, as if she saw right through me: 'I suppose, my child, you
think being old a sort of misfortune, like being hunchbacked or blind,
and are afraid of hurting my feelings, but you need n't be. The good
Lord has made it so that at whichever end of life we are, the other end
looks pretty uninteresting, and if it won't hurt your feelings to have
somebody in the party who has got through all the troubles you have yet
before you, I should be glad to come.' That was turning the tables for
us pretty neatly, eh, girls?"

The young ladies would not have had the old lady guess it for worlds,
but truth compels me to own that all that week they improved every
opportunity furtively to study Mrs. Fellows's gait and manner, with a
view to perfecting their parts.

Frank and George met a couple of times in Henry's room to smoke it
over and settle details, and Henry called on Jessie to arrange several
concerted features of the programme, and for some other reasons for
aught I know.

As each one studied his or her part and strove in imagination to
conceive how they would act and feel as old men and old women, they grew
more interested, and more sensible of the mingled pathos and absurdity
of the project, and its decided general effect of queerness. They all
set themselves to make a study of old age in a manner that had never
occurred to them before, and never does occur to most people at all.
Never before had their elderly friends received so much attention at
their hands.

In the prosecution of these observations they were impressed with the
entire lack of interest generally felt by people in the habits and
manners of persons in other epochs of life than their own. In respect
of age, as in so many other respects, the world lives on fiats, with
equally little interest in or comprehension of the levels above or below
them. And a surprising thing is that middle age is about as unable to
recall and realize youth as to anticipate age. Experience seems to go
for nothing in this matter.

They thought they noticed, too, that old people are more alike than
middle-aged people. There is something of the same narrowness and
similarity in the range of their tastes and feelings that is marked in
children. The reason they thought to be that the interests of age have
contracted to about the same scope as those of childhood before it has
expanded into maturity. The skein of life is drawn together to a point
at the two ends and spread out in the middle. Middle age is the period
of most diversity, when individuality is most pronounced. The members of
the club observed with astonishment that, however affectionately we
may regard old persons, we no more think of becoming like them than
of becoming negroes. If we catch ourselves observing their senile
peculiarities, it is in a purely disinterested manner, with a complete
and genuine lack of any personal concern, as with a state to which we
are coming.

They could not help wondering if Henry were not right about people never
really growing old, but just changing from one personality to another.
They found the strange inability of one epoch to understand or
appreciate the others, hard to reconcile with the ordinary notion of a
persistent identity.

Before the end of the week, the occupation of their minds with the
subject of old age produced a singular effect. They began to regard
every event and feeling from a double standpoint, as present and as
past, as it appeared to them and as it would appear to an old person.

Wednesday evening came at last, and a little before the hour of eight,
five venerable figures, more or less shrouded, might have been seen
making their way from different parts of the village toward the Fellows
mansion. The families of the members of the club were necessarily in the
secret, and watched their exit with considerable laughter from behind
blinds. But to the rest of the villagers it has never ceased to be a
puzzle who those elderly strangers were who appeared that evening and
were never before or since visible. For once the Argus-eyed curiosity of
a Yankee village, compared with which French or Austrian police are easy
to baffle, was fairly eluded.

Eight o'clock was the hour at which the old folks' party began, and the
reader will need a fresh introduction to the company which was assembled
at that time in Mary Fellows's parlor. Mary sat by her grandmother,
who from time to time regarded her in a half-puzzled manner, as if it
required an effort of her reasoning powers to reassure her that the
effect she saw was an illusion. The girl's brown hair was gathered back
under a lace cap, and all that appeared outside it was thickly powdered.
She wore spectacles, and the warm tint of her cheeks had given place to
the opaque saffron hue of age. She sat with her hands in her lap, their
fresh color and dimpled contour concealed by black lace half-gloves. The
fullness of her young bosom was carefully disguised by the arrangement
of the severely simple black dress she wore, which was also in other
respects studiously adapted to conceal, by its stiff and angular lines,
the luxuriant contour of her figure. As she rose and advanced to welcome
Henry and Jessie, who were the last to arrive, it was with a striking
imitation of the tremulously precipitate step of age.

Jessie, being rather taller than the others, had affected the stoop of
age very successfully. She wore a black dress spotted with white, and
her whitened hair was arranged with a high comb. She was the only one
without spectacles or eyeglasses. Henry looked older and feebler than
any of the company. His scant hair hung in thin and long white locks,
and his tall, slender figure had gained a still more meagre effect from
his dress, while his shoulders were bowed in a marked stoop; his gait
was rigid and jerky. He assisted himself with a gold-headed cane, and
sat in his chair leaning forward upon it.

George, on the other hand, had followed the hint of his father's figure
in his make-up, and appeared as a rubicund old gentleman, large in the
waist, bald, with an apoplectic tendency, a wheezy asthmatic voice, and
a full white beard.

Nellie wore her hair in a row of white curls on each side of her head,
and in every detail of her dress and air affected the coquettish old
lady to perfection, for which, of course, she looked none the younger.
Her cheeks were rouged to go with that style.

Frank was the ideal of the sprightly little old gentleman. With his
brisk air, natty eye-glasses, cane and gloves, and other items of dress
in the most correct taste, he was quite the old beau. His white hair was
crispy, brushed back, and his snowy mustache had rather a rakish effect.

Although the transformation in each case was complete, yet quite
enough of the features, expression, or bearing was apparent through the
disguise to make the members of the party entirely recognizable to each
other, though less intimate acquaintances would perhaps have been at
first rather puzzled. At Henry's suggestion they had been photographed
in their costumes, in order to compare the ideal with the actual when
they should be really old.

"It is n't much trouble, and the old folks will enjoy it some day. We
ought to consider them a little," Henry had said, meaning by "the old
folks" their future selves.

It had been agreed that, in proper deference to the probabilities, one,
at least, of the girls ought to illustrate the fat old lady. But they
found it impossible to agree which should sacrifice herself, for no
one of the three could, in her histrionic enthusiasm, quite forget her
personal appearance. Nellie flatly refused to be made up fat, and Jessie
as flatly, while both the girls had too much reverence for the sweet
dignity of Mary Fellows's beauty to consent to her taking the part, and
so the idea was given up.

It had been a happy thought of Mary's to get her two younger sisters,
girls of eleven and sixteen, to be present, to enhance the venerable
appearance of the party by the contrast of their bloom and freshness.

"Are these your little granddaughters?" inquired Henry, benevolently
inspecting them over the tops of his spectacles as he patted the elder
of the two on the head, a liberty she would by no means have allowed
him in his proper character, but which she now seemed puzzled whether to
resent or not.

"Yes," replied Mary, with an indulgent smile. "They wanted to see what
an old folks' party was like, though I told them they wouldn't enjoy it
much. I remember I thought old people rather dull when I was their age."

Henry made a little conversation with the girls, asking them the list
of fatuous questions by which adults seem fated to illustrate the gulf
between them and childhood in the effort to bridge it.

"Annie, dear, just put that ottoman at Mrs. Hyde's feet," said Mary to
one of the little girls. "I 'm so glad you felt able to come out this
evening, Mrs. Hyde! I understood you had not enjoyed good health this
summer."

"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.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Old Folks' Party - 1898" ***

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