Growing Up
When I asked Perilla how she first came to realize that she was growing up, she said, "When I began of my own accord to wash my sticky fingers, without waiting to be told." I believe she meant it literally, with no moral significance that should make a parable of the statement. I hope so, at least, for then by that test I cannot hope to have yet attained the years of discretion. Little Sister says that she felt "growing pains," but here is a figure of speech, surely. I suppose she means the wonder of the passage from a great, wistful ignorance to a limited knowledge; for the first part of the path of life is a very steep up-grade.
I myself can point to no one circumstance that revealed to me the vision of the great march of time that is sweeping us on towards the goal. I was for long like one who looks from the window of a railway carriage, too busily engaged in watching the world fly past him to realize his own motion. Neither long trousers nor razors awoke me from the child-trance; I saw scorned infants master me by their inches; I heard rumours of love and death and duty, but I was unmoved. It was a part of the game of existence, and it seemed natural that persons should be classified and remain in categories of old and young. I was a spectator outside the merry-go-round. I was to be rich, of course; I had the mind to dare and the will to do. I should be wise, too--why not? Sometimes I should have memories, I thought, not knowing that I was even then living away my life, and that this was an era to which I should look back and deem important.
All my reading, too, went to show that I was an amateur at living. Things seemed really to happen in books, but not to me; there men were swung in unknown furies, sensations were keen and impelling, and life had the sharp sting of reality. My own emotions seemed insipid and inadequate for a citizen of the world. Surely such minor escapades and trivialities as mine were not worth considering. And so, when the storm and stress came, I was ill-prepared, and at the first blow my pride went down. Some devil, as in a dream, whispered in my ear that perhaps I might not succeed after all, and it came to me as a summons that the time had come to be out and doing. And I saw that the conquest of my ambition would be achieved, not by the impetuous onslaught that should carry all before it, but by the slow and tedious siege, laid with years of waiting and working and watching. It was then, perhaps, though I did not know it, that I began to grow up, and became a man. I opened my eyes and looked about me; it was as if I had been landed fresh from the country in the busy town, like the Sleeper Awakened. No more field-faring and trapesing holidays under the blue sky; I must choose my street and fight my way for it against the throng.
It struck me with a sense of my inferiority that there was an absolute quality of knowledge I had not mastered. Some of my classmates seemed to know things, while I had but acquired information. They could swim; I dared not go in over my head. They had convictions, I had only opinions; it was the difference between the language of Frenchmen and they who learn French. Here, I thought, was the final classification, and I wrote myself down a witless neophyte in the world's mysteries. For my whole education had been founded upon the value of the verity of the straight line, and wisdom was my highest ideal. By this standard I measured myself and my experience. I delighted in the beauty of science, but of that other beauty which is its own excuse for being, I did not know. I was as one who saw form without colour, or the outline without the mass. I had not yet come to myself; I was a child yet, and the result of my immediate environment--a mental chameleon. A few generations of my austere ancestors impregnated my blood with their stern virtues, and it still ran cold and tranquil in my veins. But there were more remote and subtle influences behind me that must work themselves out, and in some sub-stratum of consciousness the pure Greek in me survived.
And so it was Dianeme who brought me at last to the door of the temple, and I saw with her eyes and heard with her ears, and the world grew beautiful, an altogether fitting setting for her charms. And then I knew in very truth that I had grown up; but yet, by a sublime miracle I had in the same revelation recovered my youth--if, indeed, I had ever really been young before! Now, succeed or fail as I might, life would always be fair and interesting, for Dianeme was but one of a divine sisterhood, and there were many degrees to be taken. So a kind of passion seized me to know Life's different phases and find the secret of the whole; and that mood, God willing, shall preserve my virginity to the end.
So here I am, by the grace of Dianeme, on the true road to youth again, not to that absolute unconcern of all but the present, that I once felt, nor to the fool's paradise, where, Maida would have it, is the true happiness--"the ability to fool one's self"--but to a kind of childlike wonder at things (ah, Little Sister, may you never wander from it as I did!) and the knowledge of what is really the most worth while. (And you, Perilla, you need not pretend that you don't know, for the truth flashes from your jest!)
For this is the very blossom of my youth, the era of knowing, as that was the era of being, and though there may come other dark days, as there were before the bud burst into bloom, I have seen the beginning and I know the law now, and I trust that the fruit of my life, the doing, may be even more worth the while. And I shall perhaps find that wisdom and beauty and goodness are but one thing, as the poets say--that living is a continual growing up, and that age is only a youth that knows why it is happy!
A Pauper's Monologue
Understand, I am not one of those who are always longing to be rich. I do very well, ordinarily, in the shadow of prosperity, though there comes upon me periodically the lust for gold, at which times the desire to rush down-town and spend money indiscreetly must be obeyed. It is a common symptom, paupers tell me, and carries with it its own remedy, giving much the same relief that blood-letting did of old, if so be the practice does not lead to a dangerous hemorrhage. I have my ups and downs, like most unsalaried Bohemians, thin purse, thick purse, at erratic intervals, but my spendthrift appetite is curiously independent of these financial fluctuations. In fact, a miserly restraint is most likely to seize me when my pocket is full, and I usually grow reckless when it has no silver lining.