_ OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN XIII
Ah, here you are again! What; you don't remember me? Why, I remember you. It was last Christmas, don't you know, in this store? You were buying a mustache-cup--there now, don't blush; perhaps it was slippers, or a smoking-cap. Anyhow, it was for him. Ah; so you do remember me. But why do you call him Mr. Smith, now? It was Jack, then. You never regarded him as anything but a friend? Of course not; but, my dear, when young people begin to look upon each other as friends--you see I accent it right--it is very apt to be the overture to a very difficult opera which is as likely to end with the curtain descending to the strains of slow music as any other way. I like to see the young interchanging gifts at holiday times, but I might be allowed to suggest, as the result of the observation of an old man, be careful of what you write in sending them. You have seen pictures of Cupid--so healthful, so chubby and rosy, and such promise of long life. It is a mistake; I know of no greater invalid--none of the gods whose health is so frail. I have known a cold word to give him a fatal chill. I have seen him fly, never to return, from a mere scent--a cigarette breath. I have known him taken incurably ill at the bad fit of a Jersey or the set of an overcoat. And I have seen him lie down and die without a word and nobody ever knew the reason why; even if he knew it himself, which I very much doubt. So, you see, it will be a very wise precaution in dealing with such an uncertain god to be prepared for everything. And one preparation is to be careful of what you put on paper. Many a young girl and many a young man, in an effort to write their little notes, sending or receiving holiday presents, often overstep the mark in trying to strike the proper elevated key. Don't abound in literary gush, no matter what are your sentiments in giving or receiving; if you write at all, write a plain, brief, dignified note which you can read five years after with perfect satisfaction. Notes are often misunderstood, sometimes we don't exactly understand ourselves when we write them, and so it is always safer to be on the conservative side. It will often save a good deal of vain regret and many wishes to goodness that you had taken this advice.
* * * * *
And you here too! Going to surprise your husband with a present again? A copy of the Revised Version this time? Ah, that will give him a chance to give you a surprise next Christmas--by reading it. Ah, you should know Mrs. Boyzy, if you wish to know how to please your husband at Christmas. For now thirty years that estimable woman has opened her annual Christmas campaign on me as early as the month of October. With affectionate strategy I am lured into book stores, and variety stores, and china stores--last year she tolled me into a drug store--to discover by artful references to this thing and that, what I fancy. Now, as a matter of fact, having her, I fancy nothing else (I take it that the newest married man could get off nothing prettier than that), but I have become so used to the campaign, and also so unprincipled in my advices to shorten it, that I profess the liveliest admiration over about the second thing we come to. The result is that I often get presents of a novel character. Last year I got a hand-painted coal scuttle, and but a couple of Christmases before that, I had gotten a gaudily framed picture of some retired saint, who had been martyred and for all I know deservedly so. But the fashion of drug stores keeping holiday presents, once came near exposing my whole plan of self defence. My intense admiration of a handsomely ornamented cut glass bottle of Unfailing Lotion for Neuralgia, which I thought she was pointing out--when in fact she was trying to make me see a gorgeous dressing case--excited a suspicion even in her unsuspecting mind. But if I jest about this matter, it is not that I underestimate the sweetness of the practice of married people remembering each other at Christmas. I am not so sure that of all other gifts--not even excepting those to children--these are not the most disinterested and spring from the truest affection. It is no easy feat to have lived with a man for ten, fifteen, twenty years; to know his weakness thoroughly; to measure the wide distance from the heroic stature for which we took him, and the size into which thorough knowledge shrinks him; to have borne with all his eccentricities, his fault finding, his natural selfishness; to have discovered and to have known for years that he is after all like the rest of us only human, and yet at every recurring Christmas to send our affections back to the beginning and with a fresh and unimpaired love give him the mystic password of our hearts in a gift. If I sometimes laugh at the devices of my wife to find out what it is I want, I do not have the faintest smile at the patient and loving heart that inspires them. I do not know that I ever saw an angel, but, though her hair is tinged with gray, and youth has long since left her face, I never hear my wife, with her bright smile on Christmas morning, asking the old, girlish question, "What do you think I've got for you," that I don't see in it that sort of absolution for the past and benediction for the future which it is said only angels bring.
* * * * *
Ah, I expected to see you here! I knew you would come! Why? Ah, my boy, every veteran knows well what comes after picket firing. Let me see: at church with her, concerts, soirees--where else could you be to-day but in here buying a present? Why, you bought her that last Christmas! Oh, I see, this Christmas it is for another girl! Come now, don't look conscious over it. The girls can't help it; they will change now and then, It is not their fault, but still it will happen. My boy, the business you are now in has by no means been reduced to a fixed science. No calculation yet made has reduced to a certainty any way of holding a girl after you think you have her. There is a good deal of money in store for the man that makes it--when he does. But she seemed--. There now, I know all about it; but you musn't hold a girl rigidly to what you think she seems. When you get to be as old as I am, you will know that girls have a hard, hard time of it. Custom won't allow them to do anything but seem. It doesn't allow them to tell a man that they like him, and, still worse, it doesn't allow them to tell him that they don't like him. You did go there, you know, pretty nearly all last year, didn't you? What could she do? Set the dogs on you? That would have been unmistakable, but in her set that isn't allowable. Be rude to you? She is a lady, how could she be rude? She shouldn't have accepted--. There now, be fair about this thing. How could she help accepting your attentions, your bonbons, your sleigh rides, your--well, your boring generally, if you will have it--without being rude? There isn't, under our social rules, a more defenceless creature on earth than an attractive girl in society, from attentions that are wearisome and unwelcome. Nor, if she maintains the self-respecting rules that society has laid down for her, is there a more helpless creature in obtaining what she wants. You often hear it flippantly said, that if a girl loves a man she can always let him know it. There never was a greater mistake. On the contrary, the poor young things, when they find it out, so far from being able to let the young fellow know it, commence a fearful struggle to keep him from knowing it. I suppose it is, so to speak, constitutional with them, and they can't help it. I have seen a gentle, well-bred young girl in such agonized fear of discovery that she rudely repulsed the common advances of politeness on the part of the object. Women lose their heads on the subject of love, as often, I sometimes think, as their hearts.
* * * * *
Why, you are only buying one little wagon this year; I thought I saw you buying two last Christmas; one of the little ones has outgrown it, I reckon? What, dead! I beg your pardon. It was thoughtless of me. Dead! Then he has outgrown it. Outgrown it all--sickness, pain, disappointments, a long, weary life--all at a single leap. But this does not comfort you. Ah, no; nothing comforts us for those we have seen slip into the dark. It will be but human in you to miss him this Christmas, and to think of the hundred ways in which he would have had pleasure if he had only lived. I think that in the death of children there is an added grief to that we feel when men and women die. They are so little, so helpless, one cannot help feeling anxious about how they will get along in the new world they have gone to; who will take care of them, and whether they will be neglected. When the time comes for putting the children to bed in the evening, we cannot help thinking about the little one who has gone from life, and wondering as we sit by the firelight whether there is any one taking care of it. We can't help feeling sure that it wants to be with its mother; it always used to when night came on. It always climbed into her lap when dark came and it surely wants to be back to-night. It cannot be happy, for it is among strangers, and if it is unhappy, there is but one place for it, its home, and but one bosom on which to lay its head, its mother's. And so our human heart talks on in its hot grief. It is a great comfort to remember, after awhile, that there is a Father who watches over it as tenderly as he has watched over all his children, and who will guide the little one into a new and higher life, as He will us older children who come to Him later in life, like tired and weary children seeking a mother's breast.
* * * * *
And so you didn't know what a castle in Spain was? Why, you have lived in one. In one! you have lived in a hundred, and if you were older you would have lived in a thousand. Why, everybody lives in castles in Spain sometimes. Let me see how to tell you about it. You know your elder sister that young Pettengill comes to see so often, and whom you hate so because you have to go to bed early? Well, your sister lives in a castle in Spain. She has had it papered and painted, and moved to another street to be near her dearest girl friend so as to make visiting convenient, and she has had the front yard fixed with flowers, particularly those he likes, and has had a door-plate put on the castle door with a name on it, CLARENCE PETTENGILL, in large letters. I remember when your father married your mother forty years ago, that she lived in a castle in Spain, and to her eyes your father was clad in shining armor and wore long plumes in his hat, and to those same eyes was a Hero of high degree. Why, even the old gentleman who is writing this to you, has lived in those castles, and as he looks back at them now with their bare walls and broken windows and tumbled down appearance generally, he often wonders how he came to build them. Some times, more especially at Christmas time, he gets on an old, and now uncertain steed called Memory, and rides back to all the castles he has lived in. So beautiful when he built them, so brightly painted by Hope and Pride and Ambition and all the other celebrated artists of that day; now so dingy and wrecked that you would hardly know them, and some clear faded out of sight. The castle, little one, that you are now living in has over the front door in big letters CHRISTMAS, and from its window you see such lots of fun that you will never have, such lots of presents that you will never get, and such a lot of imagining that you will never see realized. After this week is over, you will take down the big sign over the door, close the blinds, and stand watching with grieved heart while your castle fades into the air. There is nothing on earth, as you will see when you are old, that is not something like these castles in Spain, and but One Thing, that is not tainted with their evanescent life. God grant, little one, that at the end of our lives, you and I may have clung to that one thing, and that we may have so lived that the many mansions of our Father in a fairer world may not be for us--castles in Spain.
FINIS.
(Envoy)
FOR A SOLDIER
(Henry C. Tinsley, Died August 21, 1902)
Not 'mid the din of battle long ago,
But in the lingering clutch of later pain
Death found him, whom we shall not see again
Lifting a fearless front to every foe.
Yet shall suns somewhere shine for him, and blow
The lilies and the roses without stain,
Who through the lengthened years in heart and brain
Knew most of storm and winter with its snow.
For it is written in the starry sky,--
In the vast spaces and the silences,--
That God's eternal universe is his
Who fears not, though he live or if he die.
--A soldier to the dauntless end was he,
As riding with his red artillery.
ARMISTEAD C. GORDON.
[THE END]
Henry C. Tinsley's essays: Observations of a Retired Veteran
_