A Memory of Old Gentlemen

I HAVE always shared the preference of the poet Swinburne for very old people and very little children, and, as it has happened, nearly all of my old people have been of that sex to which Shakespeare refers as coming eventually to the “lean and slippered pantaloon.”

It began when I was a particularly roly-poly little girl of four, with brown braids carried through the back of my sunbonnet and tied fast in its strings, that the unwelcome shadow of that blue gingham might never be absent.

In compensation, I suppose, there was an equally roly-poly old gentleman who used to toss me up in the long swing under the big oak trees, singing in rhythm to my swaying self the chorus of a then popular song: —

The great, bending branches spread a canopy befitting a Druid temple, and the new little leaves, like crumpled bronze velvet, brushed my face as I held fast to the ropes, all a-tremble with the spirit of adventure and a little fear that the earth was so very far away, and was tossed up till I could peep into the nest out of which my pet blue jay had tumbled a week before. One of his brothers sat a disconsolate fluff of faded blue feathers on the edge of the nest, and the parent birds squalled noisy protest at the sturdy, red-stockinged legs invading their domestic privacy.

The oaks and the swing and the old gentleman were the first milestones on my way to Grown-Up Land. When my round fat arm had no longer to reach straight up to clasp my pudgy fingers around the thumb of my friend; when after many trials I caught the ropes and lifted myself without help to the wide board swing-seat; then I was truly “big,” and trotted off to demand that a new mark should take the place of the one that had lately shown my height on the smooth gray trunk of my favorite tree. Smooth, for those wonderful oaks, centuries old, and each many feet in girth, had been repeatedly stripped of their bark as high as a man could reach ; and now, as if tired of renewing the ever stolen coat, contented themselves with a thin, scarlike covering. Since their sapling days, perhaps, slender, conical tepees of buffalo skins had nestled in their shade, and numberless brown babies had swung “Rock-a-bye baby in a tree top ” from their limbs.

There was a broad hearth of stones between the spreading roots of one where buffalo steaks had been broiled, and where other children had roasted the plump ripe acorns as I was fond of doing.

The buffalo robes for the tepees and deerskins for the gayly wrought moccasins had been tanned with the bark stripped from those very trees under which I played and swung. In the little grove behind my beloved trees, and bordered by the tiny creek where I waded and fished with a bent pin for small flat sunfish as bright as living sunbeams, were bare poles still standing in a circle, lashed together at their tops with strips of bark or thongs of raw-hide.

There were wild cherries in the grove, good in blossom and better in fruit, puckery sweet wild plums, and a great black walnut tree dear to myself and the squirrels ; and here the spirit of adventure thrilled me again, for my fancy saw dusky faces behind every bush, and the feathery cherry blossoms were always nodding eagle feathers on the head of the warrior just waiting to seize me.

A good deal of this was due to my old friend, who had just come from the East, a far - away, mysterious Somewhere to me, and who, I am inclined to think, secretly shared my dread of these brown people in whose home we were interlopers. But some of it came from the tales to which I listened after I was tucked away in my trundle-bed on winter nights and the men gathered around the fire to talk of Indian raids and hunting and trapping adventures.

Not a few of my old gentlemen at this time were gray-bearded scouts and hunters, with great caps of fur and long rifles that seemed to tower above my head as far as the oaks. Children were rare novelties to those men of the plains, and I was passed from shoulder to shoulder, delighted with tales of bear and buffalo, and fingering with awed hands the beaded shot-pouches and belts of embroidered buckskin, but feeling all the while almost as far above earth as when I swung over the blue jay’s nest. Then we moved away, and my next old gentleman was the very antithesis of the first. Small and thin and morose, with a bitterness that almost hid the sadness in his face. A misanthrope, a miser, an atheist, said his neighbors; but in truth only a man over whom hung the shadow of a tragedy that had darkened his life. Sometimes for days his mind “ traveled a crooked road, ” as he said, and then he would wander alone in the hills, or shut himself up with his books; and no smoke came out of the chimney, and no answer was given to curious people who knocked at the door. Most children feared him, I did not; that and my love of books made the bond between us. He lent me quaint old histories and philosophies, full of big words that sounded very fine as he rolled them off in a sonorous voice. I learned to know Swedenborg from Kant, and Kant from Comte, and was in a fair way to become a philosopher myself when again we moved: so far that we both knew the parting was final.

With fingers still pudgy I crocheted him a pair of marvelous green “wristers ” as a farewell gift, and he brought me a thick red volume, De Foe’s History of the Devil, with pictures that made my brown braids rise up visibly every time I looked at them, and a single German silver teaspoon, which he said was to form the nucleus of my wedding silver.

Years later some book thief of abnormal tastes robbed me of the treasured De Foe, but the spoon still reposes in solitary state, untroubled by additions, and most unlikely to ever serve the end for which my old friend designed it.

My last word of him was in an illscrawled, childish letter from a schoolmate: “Mr. Cushion is dead; the doctor gave him some medicine and he died.” I was old enough then that a certain gladness could mingle with my regret. The shadow was lifted ; there were no more crooked roads to travel; my old friend was at rest.

It was my next old gentleman who introduced me to Shakespeare and the “lean and slippered pantaloon.” A wicked sense of the appropriateness of the quotation flashed into my mind as he read it; I wondered, in fact, if the Bard of Avon had been shuffling around in dressing-gown and carpet slippers when it was written. Yet this untidy old man, who loved Shakespeare, reveled in Shelley, and wrote heroic verse and Greek dramas by the sackful, had, they told me, been a brilliant soldier, the pick and pride of his regiment, the model in dress and deportment of all the fresh recruits. Surely the irony of fate is something more than rhetoric.

If he wrote in lighter vein he had lived in tragedy; between The Skylark and Under the Greenwood Tree we had glimpses of bloody battlefield, of disease-reeking, famine-scourged Southern prisons, of narrow escapes, and men hunted like wild beasts.

Very proud was my old friend when my own blundering thoughts first shaped themselves in verse; I doubt if Hamlet on his first appearance received such an ovation. And then one night the sacks of manuscript were packed, the little trunk strapped, and the daylight train bore away, we never knew whither, one who left word to no one, but three books — the battered Shakespeare, Shelley minus his cover, and a first edition of Whittier — to a little girl.

No word has come out of the silence, but when I am making air castles I like to think that some summer night I shall visit the Parthenon and find my old friend writing Greek dramas in the moonlight.

After that my old gentlemen began to come in pairs and trios, so that they seldom threw such a clearly focused memory. The one that I loved best was not really the best known ; we were both too shy to realize in time how much we might have been to each other. He was a gentle, quiet, courtly man; I remember that I always involuntarily looked for the pages holding up my court train of velvet and ermine when he bowed to me : a scholarly man, whom one would have taken for some gifted professor or polished diplomat: and he was in fact an Indian scout, known the length of the West for his courage and fidelity and unshakable honor. He would have stood with his life to a promise given the blackest renegade that ever harried his trail.

I knew in a vague way that his was a name in history; but we were always too busy with Sir Edwin Arnold and the Vedas and Mahatmas to talk of that. I can see him now throwing back the silver hair from a face as fine as some old marble Jove, and repeating the Sanskrit tales or the lines he loved best: —

Fit words for him who subdued himself with such gentle patience to years of blindness; never saying “Is the sun shining ? ” but “ How beautiful the hills are in the sunshine! ” It was always daylight in his soul, till he slept at last in the sunniest corner of his beloved hills.

There are many dear old gentlemen still; indeed, now that I think of it, I have never known but one young man at all intimately, and him I have not met face to face. Homer and Odysseus have been such satisfying friends that I have not missed Paris and Adonis. The flavor of old wine has been too long on my lips for me to change now, and I shall be well content to have it said of me at last: “Here lieth one who had the friendship of old men and little children’s love.”

Sharlot M. Hall.