The baby paused, and reached out his wasted hand for the glass. His pinafore and his tiny shoes on the chest of drawers caught my eye, and moistened it with the thought he would never don them again.
"As my mother brooded upon this bitter truth," he resumed, when he had refreshed himself, "and saw how sad an illustration of it was her own life—with its sufferings and its mistakes—she could not help wishing existence had been ordered otherwise. If we had had at least two lives, we might profit in the second by the first. But, she told herself, with a sigh, this was vain day-dreaming. Then suddenly the thought flashed upon her. Granting that more than one life was impossible upon this planet, why should it not be differently distributed? Suppose, instead of flowing on like a stream, one's life progressed like a London street—the odd numbers on the one side and the even on the other, so that after doing the numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, &c., &c., one could return and do the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, &c., &c. Without craving from Providence more than man's allotted span, what if, by a slight re-arrangement of the years, it were possible to extort an infinitely greater degree of happiness from one's lifetime! What if it were possible to live the odd years, gleaning experience as well as joys, and then to return to the even years, armed with all the wisdom of one's age! What if her child could enjoy this inestimable privilege! The thought haunted her, she brooded on it day and night; and when I was born, she drew me eagerly towards her, as if to see some mark of promise written on my forehead. But a year passed before she dared to think her wish had found fulfilment. On the eve of my first birthday she measured and weighed me with intense anxiety, though pretending to herself she only wished to keep a register of my growth. In the morning I was more by a year's inches and pounds. I had shot up at a bound into my third year, and manifested sudden symptoms of walking and talking. She almost fainted with joy when my unexpected teeth bit her finger. She could not get my shoes on me, nor my frock. But, although my mother had made no preparations for my changed condition, she welcomed the trouble I put her to, and carefully laid aside my useless garments, knowing I should want them again. The neighbours noticed nothing; they thought me a big boy for my age, and extremely precocious. When I was in my fifth year I went on the stage as an 'infant phenomenon,' my age being attested by my certificate of birth, though you will of course see that I was really in my ninth. In the next few years I made enough money to gild my mother's few declining years; and when I retired temporarily from the boards at the advice of my critics, it was of course with the intention of studying and returning to the stage when I was younger. And so I advanced to manhood, skipping the alternate years. I rejoice to say that my mother, though she died when I was seventy-three, had the satisfaction of knowing what felicity her unselfish aspiration had brought into my life. She told me of my strange exemption from the common burden of continuous existence, as soon as I had skipped into years of discretion. Not for me did Time pass with that tragic footstep which never returns on itself; for me he was not the irrevocable, the relentless. I regretted my lost youth—but it was not with hopeless, passionate tears, with mutinous yearnings after the impossible; it was as one who waves a regretful adieu to a charming girl he will meet again."
"Ah! but you will not meet her again," I said softly.
"No; but the feeling was the same. Of course, when I was thirty I did not know I should die before I was two. I had no more privilege of prescience than the ordinary mortal. But in everything else how enviable was my lot compared to his whom every day is sweeping towards Death, for whom no vision of renewed youth gleams behind the black hangings! Oh! the glory of growing old without dread, with the assurance that age, which is ripening you, is not ripening you for the Gleaner, that the years will add wisdom without eternally subtracting the capacity for joy, and that every tottering step is bringing you nearer, not the Grave, but the joyous resurrection of your youth!"
"And you have experienced that?" I cried, with envious incredulity.
"Yes," answered the baby solemnly. "Of course I prepared for the Great Change. Not that Nature did not herself smooth the metamorphosis. The loss of teeth, the gradual baldness, the feeble limbs, everything pointed to the proximity of my Second Childhood. I knew that my odd life had not much longer to run, that at any moment the transformation might take place and the even numbers begin. Giving out that I was going to explore the African deserts, and accompanied only by my faithful body-servant, Downton, I retired to Egypt to await the great event, having previously ordered baby-linen and the various requisites of infantile toilette. I had at one time meditated providing myself with parents, but ultimately concluded that they would prove too troublesome to manage, and that it would be better to trust myself entirely to the management of Downton, since I had already placed myself in his power by leaving him all my money."
"But what necessity was there for that?" I enquired.
"Every necessity," he replied gravely. "Do you not see that I had to arrange all my affairs and make my will before being born again, because afterwards I should not be of legal age for ten years. At first I thought of leaving all my money to myself and passing as my own child, but there would have been difficulties. I was unmarried and seventy-seven. Downton could easily pretend his septuagenarian master had died in the African deserts, but he could not so easily patch up a marriage there. I had no option, therefore, but to make Downton my heir, and I have never had occasion to regret it from the day of my rebirth to this, the day of my death. As soon as I was born we returned to England, and I wrote my obituary and drove to the Press Association with it. Downton took it into the office while I waited in Fleet Street in the hansom. I can scarcely hope to convey to you an idea of the intensity and agreeableness of my sensations at this unprecedented epoch. The variegated life of Fleet Street gave me the keenest joy: every sight and every sound—beautiful or sordid—thrilled my nerves to rapture. I was interested in everything. Imagine the delicious freshness of one's second year supervening upon the jaded sensibilities of seventy-seven. All my wide and varied knowledge of life lay in my soul as before, but transfigured. Over my large experience of men and things was shed a stream of sunshine which irradiated everything with divine light; every streak of cynicism faded. I had the wisdom of an old man and the heart of a little child. I believed in man again, and even in woman. I shed tears of pure ecstasy; and when I heard a female of the lower classes say: 'Poor little thing! What a shame to leave it crying in a cab!' I laughed aloud in glee. She exclaimed: 'Ah! now it's laughing, my petsy-wootsy!' Her conversation saddened me again, and I was glad I had not burdened myself with a mother, and that I took my milk from a bottle instead of a doting nurse. And how exquisite was this same apparently monotonous menu of milk to an epicurean who had ruined his digestion! I felt I was recuperating on a vegetarian diet, and I rejoiced to think some years must elapse before I would care for champagne or re-acquire a taste for full-flavoured Manillas. Perhaps somewhat unreasonably, I was proud of my strength of will, which had enabled me in one day to abandon tobacco without a pang, and seven-course dinners without repining. I slept a good deal, too, at this period, whereas I had previously been greatly exercised by insomnia. But these joys of the senses were as nothing to the joys of the intellect. An exquisite curiosity played like a sea-breeze about my long-stagnant soul. All my early interests revived; worldly propositions I had thought settled showed themselves unstable and volant; everything was shaken by the moving spirit of youth. Theology, poetry, and even metaphysics became alive; all sorts of unpractical questions became suddenly burning. I saw in myself the seeds of a great thinker: a felicitous congruity of opposite capacities that had never before met in a single man—the sobriety of age tempered by the audacity of youth, fire and water, judgment and inspiration. I was revolutionist and reactionary in one. I read all the new books, and agreed with all the old."
"All you tell me only makes the pathos of your premature death more intolerable," I said in moved accents. "You are, like Keats and Chatterton,—only an earlier edition,—an inheritor of unfulfilled renown."
The little blue eyes smiled wistfully at me.