As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays—and, after all, I think I prefer her to go dressed just as she is.
XXI
A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION
Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of remembrance to date our letters with the new "anno domini." And have you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression. Nineteen hundred and—we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its best—and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening. There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has already been Christmas in the shops.
Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains:
And here is but December left and I,
To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May,
And if the wild rose with so fine a flush
Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way
The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet,
And if the throstle sang in yonder bush,
And if the lark dizzied with song the sky.
I watched and listened—yet so sweet, so fleet,
The mad young year went by!
Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will "load every rift with ore."
This year, I said, when first along the lane
With tiny nipples of the tender green
The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again,
This year I watch and listen; I have seen
So many springs steal profitless away,
This year I garner every sound and sweet.
And you, young year, make not such haste to bring
Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet,
Treasure on treasure of the precious spring;
But bring all softly forth upon the air,
Unhasting to be fair...
Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But meanwhile here is the snow.