I
Charles Lamb, in his "Grace Before Meat," protests—very endearingly, it seems to me—against the custom of particular thankfulness for food. He suspects that it had its origin in the "hunter state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing; when a bellyful was a windfall and looked like a special Providence.—"It is not otherwise easy to be understood," he avers, "why the blessing of food—the act of eating—should have had a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence."
I find myself like-minded and similarly protestant as to birthdays. I cannot discover why the blessing of these should be hailed with any very particular delight, distinct from that implied joy with which we might be expected to welcome the many other various days of the year.
It cannot be said that it was because I was abnormally shy throughout my childhood that I found birthdays embarrassing, for I had no more than the usual shyness of the average child. Moreover, my surroundings and training gave me easy confidence in others and in myself. The tragedies of my little girlhood were not exceptional: dead cats or canaries, broken dolls, the inability to make myself always understood by grown-ups, and certain moral and spiritual failures and cataclysms known only to myself and what I took to be my fearfully disappointed Maker. But barring these things, incident and customary, my early years may be said to have been especially bright and reassuring. What was it, then, which could have caused this early distrust of birthdays?
If I am to trace the growth of what perhaps seems so unwarranted a thing, I shall have to ask indulgence for what may appear to be some of that very egotism I decry: I shall have to ask to be allowed a discussion of several of my own birthdays, and their celebration when I was a child.
My fifth is the earliest that I remember. I had been promised a cake with candles. Moreover, I had learned, by dint of the patience of Mademoiselle Cinque, our queer old French governess, a little French song, which I was to sing as my own share toward the festive celebration. From the shelter of my father's arm, I was to sing it for the rest to hear:—
"Frè-re Jac-ques! Frè-re Jac-ques!
Dor-mez vous? Dor-mez vous?
Son-nez les matines; son-nez les matines;
Den, din, don!"
The cake, then, and the song were, from my point of view, the extraordinarily important and sufficient events of the day—these and the fact that on that day I would be five years old. It is certain that I chattered about these things a great deal, and laid deep plans. But, as it happened, it was neither the cake nor yet my ripe years that were to make that day so memorable. I can close my eyes and go back to it unerring, and find myself in the old surroundings, familiar yet strange—strange that day with an unwonted, unaccountable strangeness. Where was everybody? The house was, indeed, still—as still as the February day outside, which lay quiet as death under a sheeted whiteness that had been drawn over it silently in the night.
I can seem to feel myself actually as little as I was then, and with my doll under one arm going up the silent stairs, laboriously but determinedly, pulling one leg resolutely after the other, up the length of them, with the aid of one hand on the banister spindles, to investigate for myself the strangeness.
An older sister of mine, whom I loved dearly, had been ill, and for several days past I had been cautioned to gentleness and had played apart, so that quietness of a certain kind I understood. But the quietness now was of a different order. In the upper hall some one opened a door, at the patter of my investigating steps, I suppose; held out a hand, stopped me in mid-search—stopped me and kissed me and told me. My sister had died in the early hours of that day, before the dawn was come.
I do not remember who it was who told me. I remember, however, pushing myself away from the embrace a little, demanding whether I might see my mother. I was told with great gentleness that this was impossible. My father? No; him, also, I might not see—not yet. All this sobered and puzzled me. I reached for the next, and perhaps on that day even dearer, possibility. Might I see the cook? Yes.
That, for a time at least, righted matters, and restored my world to me. I pattered down the stairs, down the lower hall, then more steps; found the cook and demanded my birthday cake; and in place of the cake received a most shocked look, delivered in the manner of unthinkable rebuke. When I insisted, words came to her tongue, but not concerning the cake. They dealt wholly with myself. They conveyed the impression that I had done some dreadful and wicked thing. They did not explain. I was expected to understand and repent.
I remember feeling only thoroughly outraged at having my reasonable request received in that manner. This was my day, and, in honor of it, there was to have been a birthday cake. As to larger matters, they were extraneous to the subject. Of death, it should be remembered, I had absolutely no knowledge. I loved my sister to the full bent of my simple but ardent little nature, and she had been peculiarly devoted to me; but ask some one who has never seen the stars or spoken with one who has seen them, what he knows of the deep firmament: so much I knew of that night which had fallen upon our house—nothing!
What I did know presently—the information being conveyed to me in unmistakable terms by the cook—was that my birthday celebration was not to be; that it was not only jeopardized, it was clean wiped out, by an event of immensely greater moment. I have little doubt I wept sufficiently over my personal disappointment, and it may have taken especial tact on the part of the gentle person upstairs to pacify me; but by and by, with that easy forgetfulness which is the better part of childhood, I must have relinquished all hope of appropriating that day as my birthday, and accepted, in place of it, life as it was.
My parents, who twice before had been summoned to bear acute loss,—once when, before I was born, a little baby brother of mine died, and once when the life of a little baby sister had flickered out before the flame got well started,—tasted now of what must have been a far deeper bitterness. She who had gone now was their "extreme hope."
She was twenty-one when she died, and within a few months of her graduation at the University. She was brilliant above any promise given by the rest of us. I remember her very clearly—her sensitive and beautiful face, her great delicacy of body, her ready, very gentle laugh, and her unfailing understanding of all a little child's desires and moods. She was exquisite, sensitive as a mimosa in a garden of sturdier growth. Above us all she seemed to stretch delicate and flowering branches, in which the wind moved more mysterious; and lovely winged and songful things, that we could never have hoped to harbor, seemed to have made their home in her. There was in her something rare and unlooked for (I do not exaggerate), like the sudden call of a thrush in the twilight, or delicate and darkling, as in starlight the song of the nightingale. She was the one reckoned to be most like my father, and by the generous, and, I think, even proud consent of all of us, was by him the most beloved. She was as devoted as Cordelia, and with lesser cause, bringing to the happiness and fullness of his life what Lear knew only in his desolation. Since I have grown into what is at least some slight realization of what her loss must have meant to my father, I cannot touch without a trembling of tears the memory of his taking me in his arms as he did, to look upon her as she lay, white and final, delicate and done with life, there in the still and shuttered room.
But, incredible though it seems to my present knowledge, I had then no feeling of sadness whatever. She might have slept. Nor did the days that followed lay heavy hands upon me. There was a quiet stir and hushed preparation toward what I did not know, and I was looked after by neighbors or relatives to the extent of believing that a certain pleasant distinction accrued to me. In all that followed, I know that I contributed no sadness, only a child's frank observation in the face of unusual behavior of its elders.
But to return to the birthday. It was a remarkable one, you see, linked with all these things, allied to such large sorrows—a sad one and disappointing enough, you will say, for a little child. Yet I did not find it so. I was, as I have told you, indignant as to the cake, and disappointed, no doubt, that there was no happy and devoted family now gathered to hear me sing my gay little song. But to offset these there was a kind of reassurance in the day which I find it difficult to describe very exactly. It was as if, at one and the same time, this were and were not my birthday. It was my day by the calendar, but in no other way. For a birthday is one whose dawn and sunset are one's very own, a day when one's importance is admitted very gladly by a certain intimate circle. But on no day of my life, I am sure, was I of so little importance as then—a very inconsiderable little person, playing alone in the sunshine and with my song unsung. Yet something in that day shines now across the years, as distant as a star, as silver, as satisfying. That something is not to be ascribed to any one mere incident: it was compounded, no doubt, of the best of every relationship which I felt that day for the first time. The extreme gentleness of the grown-up of whom I have told you was one element; for the rest, the companionship with my father in that strange still moment in the shuttered room; the wordless love given me by my mother, of a different sort from any she had given me before; the quietness, giving me an impression as of remote spaces never dreamed of before; and, over all, the sense of something strange and of a great dignity, as of presences that moved, dread, but not unkindly.
And the little song which I had practised so faithfully, and which I was to have sung! Little as I was, and without ever being told, I believe, as the day wore on, I must have had a dim realization of how inconsiderable it was in that house where Death had taken up Life's lute, and, brows bent above it, remembered the songs that Life had sung.