The Old Folks' Party by Edward Bellamy (top 50 books to read TXT) 📖

they had been photographed in their costumes, in order to compare the ideal with the actual when they should be really old.

"It is n't much trouble, and the old folks will enjoy it some day. We ought to consider them a little," Henry had said, meaning by "the old folks" their future selves.

It had been agreed that, in proper deference to the probabilities, one, at least, of the girls ought to illustrate the fat old lady. But they found it impossible to agree which should sacrifice herself, for no one of the three could, in her histrionic enthusiasm, quite forget her personal appearance. Nellie flatly refused to be made up fat, and Jessie as flatly, while both the girls had too much reverence for the sweet dignity of Mary Fellows's beauty to consent to her taking the part, and so the idea was given up.

It had been a happy thought of Mary's to get her two younger sisters, girls of eleven and sixteen, to be present, to enhance the venerable appearance of the party by the contrast of their bloom and freshness.

"Are these your little granddaughters?" inquired Henry, benevolently inspecting them over the tops of his spectacles as he patted the elder of the two on the head, a liberty she would by no means have allowed him in his proper character, but which she now seemed puzzled whether to resent or not.

"Yes," replied Mary, with an indulgent smile. "They wanted to see what an old folks' party was like, though I told them they wouldn't enjoy it much. I remember I thought old people rather dull when I was their age."

Henry made a little conversation with the girls, asking them the list of fatuous questions by which adults seem fated to illustrate the gulf between them and childhood in the effort to bridge it.

"Annie, dear, just put that ottoman at Mrs. Hyde's feet," said Mary to one of the little girls. "I 'm so glad you felt able to come out this evening, Mrs. Hyde! I understood you had not enjoyed good health this summer."

"I have scarcely been out of my room since spring, until recently," replied Jessie. "Thank you, my dear" (to the little girl); "but Dr. Sanford has done wonders for me. How is your health now, Mrs. Fellows?"

"I have not been so well an entire summer in ten years. My daughter, Mrs. Tarbox, was saying the other day that she wished she had my strength. You know she is quite delicate," said Mary.

"Speaking of Dr. Sanford," said Henry, looking at Jessie, "he is really a remarkable man. My son has such confidence in him that he seemed quite relieved when I had passed my grand climacteric and could get on his list. You know he takes no one under sixty-three. By the way, governor," he added, turning around with some ado, so as to face George, "I heard he had been treating your rheumatism lately. Has he seemed to reach the difficulty?"

"Remarkably," replied George, tenderly stroking his right knee in an absent manner. "Why, don't you think I walked half the way home from my office the other day when my carriage was late?"

"I wonder you dared venture it," said Jessie, with a shocked air. "What if you had met with some accident!"

"That's what my son said," answered George. "He made me promise never to try such a thing again; but I like to show them occasionally that I'm good for something yet."

He said this with a "he, he," of senile complacency, ending in an asthmatic cough, which caused some commotion in the company. Frank got up and slapped him on the back, and Mary sent Annie for a glass of water.

George being relieved, and quiet once more restored, Henry said to Frank:--

"By the way, doctor, I want to congratulate you on your son's last book. You must have helped him to the material for so truthful a picture of American manners in the days when we were young. I fear we have not improved much since then. There was a simplicity, a naturalness in society fifty years ago, that one looks in vain for now. There was, it seems to me, much less regard paid to money, and less of morbid social ambition. Don't you think so, Mrs. Tyrrell?"

"It's just what I was saying only the other day," replied Nellie. "I'm sure I don't know what we 're coming to nowadays. Girls had some modesty when I was young," and she shook her head with its rows of white curls with an air of mingled reprobation and despair.

"Did you attend Professor Merryweather's lecture last evening, Mrs. Hyde?" asked Frank, adjusting his eye-glasses and fixing Jessie with that intensity of look by which old persons have to make up for their failing eyesight. "The hall was so near your house, I did n't know but you would feel like venturing out."

"My daughters insisted on my taking advantage of the opportunity, it is so seldom I go anywhere of an evening," replied Jessie, "and I was very much interested, though I lost a good deal owing to the carrying on of a young couple in front of me. When I was a girl, young folks didn't do their courting in public."

Mary had not heard of the lecture, and Frank explained that it was one of the ter-semi-centennial course on American society and politics fifty years ago.

"By the way," remarked George, "did you observe what difficulty they are having in finding enough survivors of the civil war to make a respectable squad. The papers say that not over a dozen of both armies can probably be secured, and some of the cases are thought doubtful at that."

"Is it possible!" said Henry. "And yet, too, it must be so; but it sounds strangely to one who remembers as if it were yesterday seeing the grand review of the Federal armies at Washington just after the war. What a host of strong men was that, and now scarcely a dozen left. My friends, we are getting to be old people. We are almost through with it."

Henry sat gazing into vacancy over the tops of his spectacles, while the old ladies wiped theirs and sniffed and sighed a little. Finally Jessie said:--

"Those were heroic days. My little granddaughters never tire of hearing stories about them. They are strong partisans, too. Jessie is a fierce little rebel and Sam is an uncompromising Unionist, only they both agree in denouncing slavery."

"That reminds me," said Frank, smiling, "that our little Frankie came to me yesterday with a black eye he got for telling Judge Benson's little boy that people of his complexion were once slaves. He had read it in his history, and appealed to me to know if it was n't true."

"I 'm not a bit surprised that the little Benson boy resented the imputation," said George. "I really don't believe that more than half the people would be certain that slavery ever existed here, and I 'm sure that it rarely occurs to those who do know it. No doubt that company of old slaves at the centennial--that is, if they can find enough survivors--will be a valuable historical reminder to many."

"Dr. Hays," said Nellie, "will you settle a question between Mrs. Hyde and myself? Were you in C------, it was then only a village, along between 1870 and '80, about forty or fifty years ago?"

"No--and yet, come to think--let me see--when did you say?" replied Frank doubtfully.

"Between 1870 and '80, as nearly as we can make out, probably about the middle of the decade," said Nellie.

"I think I was in C------ at about that time. I believe I was still living with my father's family."

"I told you so," said Nellie to Jessie, and, turning again to Frank, she asked:--

"Do you remember anything about a social club there?"

"I do," replied Frank, with some appearance of interest. "I recall something of the sort quite distinctly, though I suppose I have n't thought of it for twenty years. How did you ever hear of it, Mrs. Hyde?"

"Why, I was a member," replied she briskly, "and so was Mrs. Tyrrell. We were reminded of it the other day by a discovery Mrs. Tyrrell made in an old bureau drawer of a photograph of the members of the club in a group, taken probably all of fifty years ago, and yellow as you can imagine. There was one figure that resembled you, doctor, as you might have looked then, and I thought, too, that I recalled you as one of the members; but Mrs. Tyrrell could not, and so we agreed to settle the matter by appealing to your own recollection."

"Yes, indeed," said Frank, "I now recall the club very perfectly, and it seems to me Governor Townsley was also in it."

"Yes, I think I was a member," assented George, "though my recollections are rather hazy."

Mary and Henry, being appealed to, failed to remember anything about the club, the latter suggesting that probably it flourished before he came to C------. Jessie was quite sure she recalled Henry, but the others could not do so with much positiveness.

"I will ask Mrs. Long when I get home," said Henry. "She has always lived at C------, and is great for remembering dates. Let's see; what time do you think it was?"

"Mrs. Tyrrell and I concluded it must have been between. 1873 and 1877," said Jessie; adding slyly, "for she was married in 1877. Mrs. Tyrrell, did you bring that old photograph with you? It might amuse them to look at it."

Nellie produced a small picture, and, adjusting their spectacles and eye-glasses, they all came forward to see it. A group of six young people was represented, all in the very heyday of youth. The spectators were silent, looking first at the picture, and then at each other.

"Can it be," said Frank, "that these were ever our pictures? I hope, Mrs. Tyrrell, the originals had the forethought to put the names on the back, that we may be able to identify them."

"No," said she, "we must guess as best we can. First, who is that?" pointing to one of the figures.

"That must be Mrs. Hyde, for she is taller than the others," suggested Grandma Fellows.

"By the same token, that must be Mrs. Tyrrell, for she is shorter," said Jessie; "though, but for that, I don't see how we could have told them apart."

"How oddly they did dress in those days!" said Mary.

"Who can that be?" asked Frank, pointing to the finest-looking of the three young men. "If that is one of us, there was more choice in our looks than there is now,--eh, Townsley?"

"No doubt," said George, "fifty years ago somebody's eye scanned those features with a very keen sense of proprietorship. What a queer feeling it would have given those young things to have anticipated that we should ever puzzle over their identities in this way!"

They finally agreed on the identity of Jessie, Nellie, and Frank, and of George also, on his assuring them that he was once of slender figure. This left two figures which nobody could recognize, though Jessie insisted that the gentleman was Henry, and Mary thought the other young lady was a Miss Fellows, a girl of the village, who, she explained, had died young many, many years ago.

"Don't you remember her?" she asked them, and her voice trembled with a half-genuine sort of self-pity, as if,