Shane said, "Remember the time I 'bushed' you over in Dunlap's meadow?" To this my father scornfully replied, "You bushed me! I can see you, now, sitting there under that oak tree mopping your red face. I had you 'petered' before ten o'clock."
It all came back as they talked,—that buoyant world of the reaper and the binder, when harvesting was a kind of Homeric game in which, with rake and scythe, these lusty young sons of the East contended for supremacy in the field. "None of us had an extra dollar," explained Stevens, "but each of us had what was better, good health and a faith in the future. Not one of us had any intention of growing old."
"Old! There weren't any old people in those days," asserted Lottridge.
Along about the middle of the evening they all turned in on a game of "Rummy," finding in cards a welcome relief from the unexpressed torment of the contrast between their decrepit, hopeless present and the glowing, glorious past.
My departure on a lecture trip at ten o'clock disturbed their game only for a moment, and as I rode away I contrasted the noble sanity and the high courage of those white-haired veterans of the Border, with the attitude of certain types of city men I knew. Facing death at something less than arm's length, my father and his fellows nevertheless remained wholesomely interested in life. None of them were pious, some of them were not even religious, but they all had a sturdy faith in the essential justice of the universe. They were still playing the game as best they knew.
Like Eugene Ware they could say—
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"Standing by life's river, deep and broad, I take my chances, ignorant but unawed." |
As I sat among my fellow members at the Club, three days later, I again recalled my father and his group. Here, too, I was in the Zone of Age. A. M. Palmer, a feeble and melancholy old man, came in and wandered about with none to do him reverence, and St. Gaudens, who was in the city for medical treatment, shared his dry toast and his cereal coffee with me of a morning. George Warner, who kept a cheerful countenance, admitted that he did so by effort. "I don't like the thought of leaving this good old earth," he confessed one afternoon. "It gives me a pang every time I consider it." None of these men faced death with finer courage than my sire.
As I had a good deal of free time in the afternoon, and as I also had a room at the Club, I saw much of St. Gaudens. We really became acquainted. One morning as we met at breakfast he replied to my question with a groan and a mild cuss word: "Worse, thank you! I've just been to Washington, and on the train last night I ate ice-cream for dinner. I knew I'd regret it, but ice-cream is my weakness." He was at once humorous and savage for, as he explained, "the doctor will not let me work and there is nothing for me to do but sit around the Club library and read or write letters."
He wrote almost as many letters as I did, and so we often faced each other across a desk in the writing room. Sometimes he spoke of President Roosevelt who was employing him on the new designs for our coins, sometimes he alluded to the work awaiting him in his studio. Oh! how homesick we both were! Perhaps he felt the near approach of the hour when his cunning hand must drop its tool. I know the thought came to me, creating a tenderer feeling toward him. I saw him in a sorrowful light. He drew nearer to me, seeming more like a friend and neighbor.