But I had shaped the Parting Sign of Ageus, which is interpreted variously, but whose efficacy does not vary....
§ 5
I hated thus to despatch the little fellow, after we had played together for all of twenty-two years. Besides, his going was not alone. A great many others, I suspected, departed with him: and I fancied that if, rising, I now looked out of the library window as far as the Mill Road, I might see yonder,—passing now away from me, now that our commerce was over, and travelling in motley companionship through the gray spring weather,—all the various men and women whose lives I had fashioned for me to play with in my books. Heaven only knew, if Heaven imprudently concerned itself with such matters, how many hundreds of them there must be....
And now they were all gone, I turned to the task of getting down upon paper my notions as to the aims of my writing, and some explanation as to what I had been about during the years which I had given over to the compiling of the Biography of Dom Manuel's life. For the task approached completion: or, rather, the game drew toward its end; and that ending might well be the appropriate season for me to sit out, irrevocably, while the others played on.
However! once the Biography was really done, and once the volumes as yet accessible nowhere save in, as went my resources, that almost prohibitively priced Intended Edition, when these had been issued uniformly with the rest,—with the Kalki binding, and the usual number of misprints,—then I might or might not want to write something else. Or perhaps before that time came would come death. Time, either way, would settle the upshot without my aid. Meanwhile I most certainly wanted my epilogue, in the shape of a summing up which would explain, if only to me, just why I had been at pains to write this exceedingly long book,—which all other persons, whether obtusely or whether in self-protection, insisted upon regarding as Jurgen and several other books.
§ 6
And somehow, now that, comfortably replete with luncheon, I approach my epilogue, now it is in my mind to make verses rather than to discourse in sober and reasonable prose. But I lack any matter, too, that plainly prompts to versifying. So I somewhat vacantly consider the trees which stand about my library window. At this season they have put off their nakedness, but the green of their leaves has not yet come to its full volume. The leaves are sallow and infrequent. They dapple a luminous gray sky with much the effect of germs seen under a microscope. The grass in the long field beyond is pale and sodden: for I regard all this in a gray shining pause between the heavy spring rains. The world, in preparing to be very beautiful, is for the while disheveled looking: and it suggests to me, without any stepping stones of exact analogy, a handsome woman defamatorily clad in a shabby green dressing-gown, poised before her mirror, with her hair already partially loosened in order that she may prepare for a festival.
It is a fine festival for which the world makes ready. It is a pageant and a banqueting that will feed all the senses, and will last for months, until the white winds of November come, like gaunt janitors, to remove the furniture and decorations. Life everywhere will burgeon and exult, and bear fruit, and wane peacefully.
I mean not only grasses and bushes and trees. There will be a great barking of dogs, and cats also will make the warm night vocal. And birds too will cry out in the night, as if amazed and wistful, and that crying will be very piercingly sweet and, for no reason at all, pathetic. There will be lambs, and foals, and calves, with amateurishly constructed legs. And of course the young people—But I wonder about those young people! There is upon them a bland hard innocence, like the gloss of white china. It is slippery, and it ever so lightly chills. Yet it does seem, essentially, innocence. I recall, with a wealth of ancient instances, that my own generation, where it went unchaperoned, was remarkably unhampered by innocence: and I wonder if my own generation was like this in the presence of our elders? I do not remember; I feel that nobody could hope to remember a thing so far away: and it is in my mind to make verses.
For I remember many other matters that have to do with moonlight and with the touch of young flesh and with a lost consciousness of being fearless and eternal. Music too seems to be woven through the background of my memories, not as a thing quite noticed, but as not ever wholly absent. I remember, in fine, youth: and I know that the glad magic of youth was always a promise of whose fulfillment one lived, then, utterly assured: and I suspect that to be old means merely coming to comprehend that this promise has not been, and never will be, kept. Meanwhile I observe it is still the nature of young persons to seek out quiet places in couples, and to evince no distaste for twilight: and I surmise that even those inexplicable automobiles which stand to the side of our country roads at evening and after nightfall have at least two persons inside them. These phenomena also are a portion of the premeditated festival, of that sublimely irrational festival whose ducdamê (as Jaques in the play, you will remember, calls that invocation which draws fools into a circle) is still the promise which all, by and by, perceive to stay eternally unfulfilled.