From that moment Emmett Stocks was a changed man. He closed the Bible and looked around the room with a woe-begone countenance, and after a moment he turned and went out and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, and undressed and got into bed. For six days he lay there speechless, with the tears streaming down his face, and on the seventh day he died.
Of course, there was all sorts of talk about this in Cebada. Some of the meaner folks, those who owed Emmett money, said the reason he sickened and died was because he remembered that his Uncle Peter had promised to give Emmett that five-dollar raise on Emmett’s twenty-first birthday and, because Emmett was mistaken in his birthday, the increased pay had not begun until Emmett was twenty-two, and that thus Emmett had lost five dollars a week for a solid fifty-two weeks, back in 1864, and that the thought had been too much for him. But that was not the real reason. The real reason was that Emmett Stocks had become so used to feeling as old as his birthdays told him he ought to feel, that the sudden shock of learning that he was a year older than he had figured simply killed him. Since I heard about Emmett Stocks, I’ve quit using my birthdays to tell time by. It’s not safe.
When I was in Paris I attended a birthday party there. It was strictly a family affair; but the young man who was celebrating was the son of the lady who owned the _pension_ where I was staying, and as I had paid part of my board bill that week I was considered one of the family. I can’t say the affair was very riotous. Members of the family from near and far sat around the edge of the room on stiff-backed chairs and nibbled small cakes and sipped thin wine, and conversed gently in a sedate manner. I did not do much conversation myself, the only French I knew at that time being ‘low show,’ which means ‘hot water,’ and somehow that did not seem to work into the conversation advantageously. No matter how good a man’s intentions are, or how willing he may be to make an affair a success, he is apt to be misunderstood if he breaks into the middle of a family talk, uttering ‘hot water’ in a loud voice.
In some ways that birthday party in Paris seemed more like a highly respectable funeral than we think birthday parties should seem; but one had only to look at the young man who was the leading gentleman in the affair to know it was not a funeral. He grinned more than the corpse usually does, and seemed to be a lot more uncomfortable, but he certainly enjoyed it all and was proud to be celebrated that way. As a usual thing, I try to take a prominent part in affairs and to be the life of the party, telling amusing jokes about Pat and Mike; but this time I merely sat around and looked intelligent until the affair was over, and then I came out strong. When every one present kissed the young man on both cheeks I refrained from kissing him and shook his hand instead, and this gave the party a sort of international aspect and made it a great success.
But what I like best about the French annual doings is that when a man celebrates his birthday there he calls it his ‘fête-day,’ which means a feast-day or festival-day. And usually it is not his birthday at all; it is the day in the calendar consecrated to the particular saint whose name he bears, if any. That certainly takes a lot of sting out of birthdays and makes them more joyous and care-free, just as if I had been named Independence Butler and had a right to celebrate myself on the Fourth of July. A ‘fête-day’ suggests something to celebrate with some sort of hurrah, a person’s own Christmas or Thanksgiving, as if everybody ought to be glad I was born. ‘Birthday’ is too apt to suggest nothing but that the clock has ticked again, that another coupon has been torn from my seventy-trip book, that another hole has been punched in my meal-ticket.
I’ll bet you never saw a magazine come out on its fiftieth anniversary with a black mourning border around the front cover and an editorial saying, ‘Alas! This magazine is fifty years old now, and just that much nearer death!’ No, sir! It prints the picture of a lovely young girl on the cover, and the editorial says, ‘Hurrah, boys! We’re fifty years old and going strong and we’ll probably live forever.’
The idea that every birthday shortens your life is all nonsense. The truth is that every birthday is a guarantee that you will live longer than you ever had any right to think you would. Every birthday you reach puts your probable deathday further into the future.
When I was twenty-one I went to a young doctor to be examined for life insurance purposes, and when he had pawed me all over and listened to my interior clock-work he drew a mighty long face.