MEMORIES
The old people had been living in their village home long before I went there to become their neighbor. They had reared their family of five children in the old house, and they had all married and gone elsewhere to live. The old people were now past 65, and rather old for transplanting in a new home, but the death of a relative brought to their door a small fortune, and the children insisted that they must remove to the city and live in better style, as becomes people in affluent circumstances.
We called on them in the evening of their last day in the old home and found them sitting on the front porch, resting and dreaming after a day of packing up goods for the removal. The old lady had been silently weeping, and her heart was so full of going away that she broke down and tearfully assured us that going away was breaking ties that affect her heart for all time to come.
“Jim and me are too old to be torn up by the roots and transplanted to a town lot. We’ve lived here so long that we can’t ever make ourselves believe that a grander house and a stylish lot of neighbors is to become our home for all time.
“Why, every nook and corner of this old place is peopled with loving memories. The house seems to be a store-house filled with the echoes of our children’s happy voices and their merry laughter. I sometimes even imagine that I hear the prattling echo of little Ruth’s baby voice, the child who died when four years old.
“It may be foolish, Mr. Haiden, but no other house can ever produce the same pleasant illusions. I hear them all, when I listen, just as I heard their real voices in the long ago. But it won’t be so in the new home. They ain’t going to let me take any of the old furniture along—the chairs and the sideboard and the bureau that are all scratched with the hands of the children. And the old pictures of George Washington crossing the Delaware, and the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, and the Soldier’s Dream, and the Soldier’s Farewell—they say they’re out of date, and must be packed away on the garret.
“If these old things are out of date, what’s to be said of Jim and me? We love those old pictures and scratched pieces of furniture better than anything that’s new and has no history connected with it. We don’t want to be separated from the past so ruthlessly and violently. It’s bad enough to be torn away from our old friends and acquaintances, and taken so far away and stored away in such a grand house that none of the old neighbors will ever come to see us, and will finally grow indifferent toward us, and blame us for being stuck up and proud, and declare we were glad and willing to move away and sever the ties of love and friendship between us and our rustic neighbors.
“And if our money leaves us as suddenly as it came, and we are obliged to come back here, it will be like a spirit forced to come back to its dead and deserted body. For all these old memories and childish echoes must surely die after we are no longer here to hear them, and the house will become as dead to us as the memories that died of loneliness after we went away.
“For memories live on our love, Jim,
On the heartstrings tied to them;
They’ll die when we once remove, Jim,
And break them off love’s stem;
For they lie on my breast,
Like children at rest,
And nurse at love’s fountain brim.
And all have a beautiful head, Jim,
With faces upturned for a kiss;
I feel in my heart they’re not dead, Jim,
But living in innocent bliss;
But when we depart;
They’ll die in my heart—
And, oh, their presence I’ll miss!
They are echoes of voices so dear, Jim,
They are whispering now in my heart.
Come closer, and put your ear, Jim,
Just over the place—don’t start!
Ah, you hear the song,
That is all the day long
Singing the mournful part.”