MRS. HENRY Y. MASON’S
years numbered fifty-two, which means that she stood on that plateau of life
where one looks both hopefully forward and longingly back. Life had been very
gracious to Mother Mason. It had brought her health, happiness, and Henry; and
sometimes in a spasm of loyal devotion, Mother decided that the greatest of
these was Henry.
To-night, as she sat
knitting by the library table, her heavy figure erect, her plump face, under
its graying hair, radiating energy and kindliness, her health was evident.
As for the happiness,
the source of a goodly share of it was apparent. Sounds of youthful laughter
came with the scent of lilacs through the open windows. They were all out there
in the yard: serious-eyed Katherine home from the University for spring
vacation, lovely eighteen-year-old Marcia, merry sixteen-year-old Eleanor, and
troublesome, lovable twelve-year-old Junior. Even Bob, good, steady Bob, her
eldest, was out there, too, just leaving with Mabel, his bride of a year, for
the little home two blocks down the street. Yes, Mother had known much
happiness.
Which brings us to
Henry. That big, calm, conservative president of the Springertown First
National Bank was just sitting down on the opposite side of the library table
and unfolding the "Evening Journal" when Mother began:
"Henry, you wait a
minute. I want to talk to you about something that has been on my mind all day."
Henry looked up
politely, but hung on to his paper.
"This morning I
was cleaning out the drawers of that old bureau in the attic and I began
reading scraps of letters and looking at the pictures of my old college
classmates, and I just got hungry to see them all. I kept thinking about my
girlhood with those old chums, and I was so homesick to see them I could taste
it. Why, if I could hear Nettie Fisher laugh and see Julie Todd’s shining,
happy face!"
She dropped her
knitting and turned to her husband.
"Henry, I’ve a
good, big notion to plan to go back to Mount Carroll for Commencement."
"Why, sure! Why
don’t you, Mother?"
Henry prepared to
plunge into the paper as though the matter were settled, but it seemed Mother
had more to say. For twenty-six years Father had been a patient, silent boulder
in the middle of the stream of Mother’s chatter.
"You know, Father,
Junior would be all with the girls to look after him. And then there’s this: Of
course I knew when Bob was married that he’d probably have children--and it’s
right, too--I wouldn’t say this to a soul but you--for I am ashamed of it--but
ever since the day Mabel told me her secret, and was so happy about it--poor
child!--I’ve just resented the thought of being a grandmother. Why, Henry, I
don’t feel like a grandmother, and I’m not ready to be one."
"I don’t see any
way to stop it, Mother."
Henry stole a
surreptitious glance at a tempting editorial.
"Of course
not!" Mother was too much in earnest to be frivolous. "But before I’m
a grandmother--it’ll be in July--I want to go back to Mount Carroll and be a
girl again. If I could just get with that old crowd it would bring my youth all
back, I know. I’d just live it over. Why, Henry, I’d give the price of the trip
to have five minutes of real girlish thrill--"
"All right,
Mother." Father boldly dismissed the subject. "You just plan to go
and get your thrill."
IN THE busy weeks that
followed Mother moved in an exalted state of mind, thinking of nothing but
plans to leave the family comfortable and the exquisite pleasure before her.
She wrote reams of messages to Julie Todd and Nettie Fisher and Myra
Breckenridge and a dozen others. To be sure, they had all possessed other names
for a quarter of a century, but Mother deigned to use them only on the outside
of the envelopes.
There were clothes to
be planned. Mother thought the town dressmaker could make her something
suitable, but the girls protested.
"You’re not going
back there looking dinky, Mama, that’s sure."
And Henry added his
voice, "That’s right, Mother; you doll up."
So Marcia and Mother
journeyed to Capital City and chose a navy blue tailored suit, and a stunning
black and white silk, and a soft gray chiffon gown, "in which she looks
perfectly Astorbiltish," Marcia afterward told the assembled family.
These, with hat and gloves and a pair of expensive gray suede shoes that hurt
her feet, but made them look like a girl’s, came to a ghastly sum in three
figures, so that Mother felt almost ill when she wrote on the check,
"Henry Y. Mason, per Mrs. H. Y. M."
On the evening before
the wonderful journey back to the Land of Youth, Father made his startling
announcement. He had been reading quietly in his accustomed place by the
library table. Mother, who had been putting pictures of all the family and
views of the new house into her grip, came into the library.
"Mother"--Henry
put down his magazine--"I’ve decided to go with you to-morrow and on to
Midwestern while you are at Mount Carroll." Father’s university was in a
state farther east than Mother’s Alma Mater. "When you get off at Oxford
to change, I’ll go right on, and then next Thursday, after Commencement, I’ll
be on the train coming back, and meet you there."
MOTHER was delighted,
reproaching herself severely, in her tender-hearted way, for not having thought
of the same thing. Father had attended to business so strictly all these years
that this arrangement had not once occurred to her.
"I’ve been
thinking what you said about seeing your old chums, and, by George! I’d enjoy
it, too," Henry went on. "I can’t think of anything more pleasurable
than meeting Slim Reed and the Benson boys, and old Jim Baker."
So Father got his hat
and went back to the bank to attend to some business; for with that nonchalant
way a man has of throwing a clean collar into a grip preparatory to a long
journey there was nothing for him to do at home.
Kind-hearted Mother’s
cup of joy was bubbling over. Happy moisture stood in her eyes as she got out
Father’s things. How well he deserved the trip!
Hurrying back into the
library to get a late magazine for him to take along, her eyes fell upon the
one he had just been reading. It was the Midwestern University Alumnus.
Smiling, Mother picked it up. Under the heading "Class of ’89"--that
was Father’s--there were a couple of commonplace items. Her eyes wandered on.
"Class of ’90." There was a clever call for a reunion signed by the
Class Secretary, Laura Drew Westerman. Mother sat down heavily, and The Thing,
after a long hibernating period, awoke and raised its scaly head.
Now, there is in the
life of every married woman a faint, far-away, ghostly personage known as The
Old Girl. Just how much they had meant to each other, Mother had never known.
She did know that every spring and fall for twenty-six years she had cleaned
out a box which contained, among other trinkets, an autograph album and a copy
of Lucile and a picture of a dark-eyed girl in a ridiculously big-sleeved
dress, all marked "To Henry from Laura." Laura Drew was Henry’s old
girl.
So from this lack of
knowledge and the instinct inherited from primal woman had been hatched a
little slimy creature, so unworthy of Mother that she had refused to call it by
its real name. That had been years ago. With the coming of children and the
passing of years, The Thing had shriveled up, both from lack of nourishment and
because Mother laughed at it. A Thing like that cannot live in the white light
of Humor. But now, quite stunned by the sudden surprise that The Thing was
alive, she could only listen passively to what it was saying:
"So! even though
he has been kind and loving and good and true to you," It said tragically,
for it loves to be tragic, "across the years she has called to him."
On the train the next
day, Mother steeled herself to venture, quite casually: "I saw by your
Alumnus last night that Laura Drew is to be there."
"Yes, I saw that,
too," Father said simply, and the subject was dropped.
On the station platform
at Oxford, Mother clung to Father’s arm for just a second, he seemed so boyish
and enthusiastic. She stood for several minutes by the side of her grips
watching the train curve around the bend of the bluff, carrying Father down the
road to youth--and Laura Drew.
THEN, with
characteristic good sense, she determined to put the thought completely out of
her mind and devote herself to the resurrection of her own youth. So she walked
energetically into the station, spread a paper on the dusty bench, and sat
down. Her feet hurt her, but the trim girlish appearance of the gray suede
shoes peeping out from under the smart suit was full compensation for all
earthly ills.
A little gray-haired,
washed-out woman in an out-of-date, limpsy suit was wandering aimlessly around
the room. In the course of her ramblings she confronted Mother with a question
concerning the train to Mount Carroll. Mother, in turn, interrogated the woman.
It was Julie! Julie Todd, whose round, happy face Mother had crossed two states
to see. Poor Mother!
After the first shock,
she drew Julie down beside her on the bench and the two visited until their
train came. Julie had no permanent home. Her husband, it seemed, had been
unfortunate, first in losing the money his father had left him, and then in
having his ability underestimated by a dozen or so employers. He was working
just now for a dairyman--it was very hard on him, though--out in all sorts of
weather.
There were seven
children, unusually smart, too, but their father’s bad luck seemed to shadow
them. Joe, now, had been in the army, and had left camp for a little while--he
had fully intended to go back; but the officers were very disagreeable
and unjust about it.
And on and on through an endless tale of grievances.
It was late afternoon
when the train arrived at Mount Carroll. The station was a mass of moving
students, class colors, arriving parents and old grads. Mother’s spirits were
high.
Em met them and took
them to her pretty bungalow on College Hill. Em had never married. She was Miss
Emmeline Livingston, head of the English Department, and she talked with the
same pure diction to be found in "Boswell’s Life of Johnson." Also,
she was an ardent follower of a new cult which had for its main idea, as nearly
as Mother could ascertain, the conviction that if you lost your money or your
appetite or your reputation, you had a perfect right to believe that there had
been chaos where there should have been cosmos.
Nettie Fisher and Myra
Breckenridge had arrived that morning, and were there to greet Mother and Julie
Todd. Nettie Fisher was a widow, beautifully gowned in black. She had enormous
wealth; but the broken body of her only boy lay under the poppies in a Flanders’
field, and she had come to meet these girlhood friends to try and find surcease
for the ache that never stopped.
MYRA BRECKENRIDGE had
no children, dead or living. Her sole claims to distinction seemed to be that
she was the champion woman bridge-player of her city, and that her bulldog had
taken the blue ribbon for two consecutive years. She wore a slim, flame-colored
dress cut on sixteen-year-old lines. Her fight with Time had been persistent,
as shown by the array of weapons on her dressing table. But Time was beginning
to fight with his back to the wall.
They made an
incongruous little group, as far apart now as the stars and the seas; but it
had not evidenced itself to Mother, who, with blind loyalty, told herself
during dinner that a noticeable stiffness among them would soon wear off.
After dinner, Mother
unpacked her grips and hung the pretty gowns in a cedar closet. But the
photographs that had been packed with happy anticipation she left in the bag.
It would be poor taste to display the views of her cherished sun-parlor and
fire-place and mahogany stair-way to poor Julie, who had no home. It would be
cruel to flaunt the photographs of all those lovely daughters and sturdy sons
before Nettie, whose only boy had thrown down the flaming torch. So Mother
closed the bag and went down-stairs to meet the three boys of the old class who
had come to call.
One of the boys was a
fat judge, with a shining, bald head and a shining, round face behind shining,
round tortoise-shell glasses. One was a small, wrinkled, dapper dry-goods
merchant. And one was a tall doctor with a Van Dyke beard. This completed the
reunion of the Class of ’90.
There were numberless
seats and chairs on the roomy porch of the bungalow, and it was there that they
all sat down. The hour that followed was not an unqualified success. The
reunion appeared not to be living up to its expectations. The old crowd was
nothing but a group of middle-aged people who were politely discussing
orthopedic hospitals and the reconstruction of Rheims. Occasionally, someone
referred with forced jocularity to a crowd of jolly young folks they had once
known. Ah, well! After all, you can’t recapture Youth by trying to throw salt
on its tail.
Sensing that things
were lagging, Mother proposed that they walk up to the old school, with Em to
show them around. They found a dozen unfamiliar buildings, an elaborate new
home for the president, and a strange campanile pointing its finger,
obelisk-like, to the blue sky. Only the green-sloping campus smiled gently at
them like a kind old mother whose sweet face welcomed them home.
ON MONDAY they attended
the literary societies’ pageant. As the slowly moving lines of brilliantly
costumed girls came into view, Mother’s heart was throbbing in time to the
notes of the bugle. With shining eyes she turned to the little widow.
"Nettie," she
said solemnly, "we girls started this parade day."
"I know it. We all
had big white tissue paper hats with pink roses on them--"
"And we stole the
Beta’s stuffed monkey so they wouldn’t have a mascot--"
"And got up at four
o’clock to pick clovers for the chain."
They had made the first
chain, and now, gray-haired, they were standing on tiptoe at the edge of the
crowd trying to catch a glimpse of the lithe, radiant, marching girls--Eternal
Youth forever winding in and out under the shimmering leaves of the old oaks!
It was like that for
three days. They seemed always to be on the outskirts of things, looking on.
For three days they went everywhere together--class plays, receptions, ball
games, musicals--this little lost flock of sheep. For three days Mother exerted
herself to the utmost to catch one glimpse of the lost Youth of these men and
women. Apparently they saw everything with mature vision, measured everything
by the standard of a half-century’s experience.
On the evening of the
last day Mother gave up. She was through, she thought, as they all sat together
on the porch. There was to be a concert by the united musical organizations,
and the old crowd was ready to go and sit sedately through the last session. Very
well, thought Mother, as she chatted and rocked, she would try no more. They
were hopelessly, irrevocably middle-aged. She was convinced at last,
disillusioned, she told herself. You can never, never recapture Youth.
Then, quite gradually,
so that no one knew just how it began, there came a change. Someone said,
"Remember, Myra, the night that red-headed Philomathian came to call on
you, and we girls tied a picture of your home beau on a string and let it down
through the stove-pipe hole into his lap?"
And someone else said,
"Remember, Em, the time you had to read Hamlet’s part in ’Shake’ class and
Professor Browning criticized you so severely, and then said, ’Now you may
continue,’ and you read in a loud voice, ’Well said, you old mole’?"
AND the doctor said,
"Remember, Jim, the note you pinned on your laundry to the washlady:
"If all the socks
I’ve sent to thee
Should be delivered
home to me,
Ah, well! the bureau
would not hold
So many socks as there
would be,
If all my socks came
home to me"?
And before they were
aware, they were going off into gales of laughter.
It came time for the
concert, but no one suggested starting. Each succeeding anecdote heightened the
merriment so that the undergrads streaming by said patronizingly, "Pipe
the old duffers!"
"Remember, boys,
the Hallowe’en we girls hid from you, and you had to furnish the supper because
you didn’t find us by nine o’clock?"
They all began talking
at once about it, the men protesting that the girls had come out from the
hiding place before nine.
"If you girls hadn’t
nigged on the time, we’d have found you," the men were arguing. There was
a perfect bedlam of voices. Youth, which up to this time had eluded them, had
slipped, slyly, unbidden, into their midst. Mother was thrilling to her finger
tips.
"It was a night
almost as warm as this," the judge said, "and the moon was as
gorgeous as it is to-night."
Mother, in the stunning
black and white silk, jumped to her feet.
"Let’s do it
again!" she cried with an impulsive sweep of her hands. "To-night! It’s
the nearest to Youth we’ll ever come in our whole lives." She turned to
the men on the steps. "The rules are the same, boys. Give us fifteen
minutes’ start, and if you can’t find us by nine, we’ll come back here and you’ll
buy the supper. If you find us, we’ll buy it. Come on, girls."
As Joan of Arc may have
led her armies, so Mother’s power over the others seemed to hold. In a wave of
excitement, they rose to her bidding. Light of foot, laughing, the five women
hurried across one corner of the campus. In the shadow of the oaks Mother
stopped them.
"Is the same house
still standing?" she asked breathlessly of Em.
"Yes, but others
are built up around it now."
"Come on,
then!" With unerring feet, down to the same house where they had hidden
twenty-nine years before, Mother led them.
"What if someone
sees us?" giggled Nettie.
"We should
worry!" said the head of the English Department, which was really the most
remarkable thing that happened that night.
There it was--a house
no longer new--but still standing, and as dark as the others near it. Evidently
the occupants had gone to the concert. By the light of the moon they could see
its high cellar window, still yawning foolishly open, waiting for them, just as
it had waited before.
Against the window they
placed a sloping board and climbed slowly up, one by one. Em went first, then
Myra, and Nettie, and Julie, and, last, Mother. At least, Mother’s intentions were
good. The window was about eighteen by twenty; and Mother, quite eighteen by
twenty herself, stuck half way in and half way out. Up the street they could
hear the old whistle--the boys calling to each other. Laughing hysterically,
tugging desperately at her, the other four, after strenuous labor, pulled
Mother down into the cellar, where, groping around in the dark, she found the
cellar stairs and sat down. They were all shaking with laughter-spasms, that
kind of digestion-aiding laughter which comes less often according to the ratio
of the number of years you are away from Youth.
For some time,
whispering and giggling nervously and saying "Sh!" constantly to each
other, they sat in the black cellar.
SUDDENLY, an electric
light snapped on over Mother’s head and the door above her opened. "What
are you doing in my cellar?" snarled a voice as gruff as the biggest bear’s
in "Goldlilocks."
The giggling died as
suddenly as though it had been chloroformed.
Cold as ice, Mother
rose and faced the darkness above her. Then she said with all her Woman’s Club
dignity--which is a special de luxe brand of dignity--"If you will allow
us to come up there I think we can make a very satisfactory explanation."
"You can explain
to the town marshal," answered the sour voice, and the owner of it slammed
the door.
They sat down dismally
and waited. They heard the telephone ring and then the wooden shutter of the
cellar window was banged down and fastened.
"He needn’t have
done that," Mother said stiffly. It is claimed that house-breakers are
often sensitive about their honor.
During the long wait
every fiber of Mother’s brain concentrated on one word--disgrace. If the papers
got hold of it! Even if they wrote it up as a joke! Imagine--to be written up
as a joke at fifty-two!
There were footsteps
overhead, and then the gruff voice, "Come up out of there now!"
Slowly they filed up
the narrow dark stairs. Mother went first. As she had led them into this
sickening dilemma, so would she be the first to face the music.
"May we have some
lights?" she asked frigidly.
"Certainly."
LIGHTS were turned on.
Three men stood there: A fat one with tortoise-shell glasses; a little,
wrinkled, dapper one, and a tall one with a Van Dyke beard--all fiery red from
silent convulsions brought on by ingrowing laughter. As the women filed in, the
pent-up laughter rolled forth from the men in shrieks and howls. Then the
shouting and the tumult died, for Nettie and Julie were smothering the fat one
with someone’s sofa pillows, Myra and Em were taking care of the bearded one,
and Mother was shaking the little one, while he motioned feebly with his hands
that he was ready for peace.
"Kamarad!"
gasped the fat judge when he could get his breath. "Anyway, you’ll admit
we were speaking the truth when we said we could have found you."
"Now, let’s dig
out," said the doctor, whose respiratory organs were again working,
"before the folks that own this house come home from the concert and send
us all up."
Breaking out into
hilarious laughter at intervals, they walked down to the store at the foot of
the hill, and there the girls bought a lunch to make angels weep. It consisted
of buns, bananas, wienies, chocolate candy, and dill pickles.
Across pastures,
crawling under barb-wire fences, went the cavalcade, to build a bonfire down by
old Salt Creek. Gone were the years and the family ties. Forgotten were the
hours of failure and the hours of triumph. They were the old crowd, singing
"Solomon Levi." Youth was in their midst. And the moon, bored to the
point of ennui, at the countless hordes of students it had seen roasting
wienies in that identical spot, brightened at the novel sight of the old
duffers taking hold of hands to dance around the huge fire.
As chimes from the
campanile striking twelve came faintly through the night, Youth suddenly
dropped her festive garments and fled, a Cinderella that could not stay.
The little straggling
procession started soberly back across the meadow. Julie’s rheumatism was
beginning to manifest itself. The head of the English Department was painfully
aware that in the place where she had stowed that awful collection of
indigestibles there was chaos where there should have been cosmos. Far, far
behind the others came the judge and Mother; not from any sentimental memory of
their past friendship, but because, being the possessors of too, too solid
flesh, they were frankly puffed-out.
FATHER swung off the
steps of the train at Oxford and took Mother’s grips.
"Well, did you get
your thrill, Mother?"
"I most certainly
did." Mother was smiling to herself.
They walked down the
Pullman to Father’s section, which he had chosen with careful regard to Mother’s
comfort.
"And you--did you
have a good time?" Mother questioned when they were seating themselves.
"Fine--just
fine!" Father was enthusiasm personified.
A quick little tug at
Mother’s heart reminded her that The Thing was still alive.
"Were there many
of your old class-mates back?" she parried, giving herself time to bring
out the real question.
"Two, just
two." Father was glowing at the happy memory of some unuttered thing.
"Just old Jim Baker and I. Jim’s kind of down and out--works around the
University Cafeteria."
"Was--?" It
was coming. Mother braced herself. "Was Laura Drew there?"
"Yes." Father’s
face shone with the light of unspoken pleasure. "Yes, she was there."
The Thing seemed to
bite at Mother’s throat and wrap a strangling tail around her heart. With the
pleasure with which we turn the knife in our wounds, she asked in a tense little
voice:
"Is she--does she
seem the same?"
Father drew his rapt
gaze from some far-away vision to look at Mother.
"The same?"
he repeated, a trifle dazed. Then he said cheerfully, "Why--maybe--I don’t
know. I didn’t see her."
"Didn’t see
her?"
"No. I didn’t see
much of anybody." Father grew confidential. "The fact is, old Jim
Baker and I played checkers ’most all the time for the three days. He got off
every morning at eleven and we’d go around to his room. By George! It was nip
and tuck for two days. But the last day--I beat him."
"Checkers!"
Mother breathed but the one word, but the ingredients of which it was composed
were incredulity, disgust, merriment, and several dozen others.
Then she laughed, a
bubbling, deliciously girlish laugh, and The Thing relaxed its hold on her
heart, turned up its toes, and died.
Surreptitiously, Mother
reached down and pulled off the expensive suede shoes. "Now," she
announced, "there’s one grateful bunion in the world."
Then she fixed herself
for the long ride to the west. "Henry," she laid a plump hand on
Father’s arm, "you are such a comfort to me. Won’t it be nice to get home
and settle down to being a grandfather and a grandmother?"