OCR Text |
Show I Grandma's Flirtation 3y h MILDRED CARTER j (Copyright, 1915, by W. G. Chapman.) Now that I have passed my seventy-eighth seventy-eighth birthday I like to sit on the piazza and doze in the sun on warm afternoons. I like to see the life of the village, the girls and young men passing along the sidewalk under neath. Sometimes one of them will look up at me. "Hello, grandma!" they shout cheerfully, and nod. I like it, especially in springtime, when the leaves are beginning to unfold, un-fold, and nature takes ou a renewal of life. It is always a miracle to me, this new opening of the buds, just the same now as when I was a girl so many years ago. I was brought up very strictly, in the Presbyterian belief. In those days we all thought that only the elect could be saved, and that many were destined to perish everlastingly in hell fire. Then, I remember, Mr. Darwin brought out a book which told us we were nothing but monkeys, and had no souls, any more than the beasts. I was never so sure that the baasts hadn't, and I am less sure of It' now than ever; but, still, that was a period pe-riod of great unrest., A lot of religious relig-ious folks ceased to believe in anything, any-thing, and there was a good deal of hypocrisy in the matter of church go ing. But of late years I have seen the change that is coming over folks again. It isn't so much that they are turning back to the old beliefs as that they are "beginning to believe. They haven't got it all down so fine, about predestination and all that, I mean, but still they are beginning to believe as they used to. And that strikes me as the finest sort of belief be-lief a belief in which there is a good deal of hope mixed, a belief you have to cling to faith, I suppose. To my mind it isn't only the opening open-ing of the leaves year after year, but the opening of our hearts, too, that convinces me of a better life to come. I don't believe any of the young people who see me nodding here in "My Wife and I Were Very Happy Together." To-gether." the sun understand that even at seventy-eight one may be, at heart, the same as a girl of twenty. It was only three months ago that I met Tom Bentley, after a separation of fifty years. The Bentleys had lived for generations In this little town, but Tom went west when he was a boy, after a quarrel with his sweetheart, and I understood he had married and settled for good in California. The Erst part was true, but the second was exaggerated; at any rate, he had come back a widower, his children being be-ing married and scattered, to end his days in Four Corners. When I looked at the gray old man, and remembered the dark-haired boy whom I had loved so much and sent away, my heart felt as if it was going to break. But after a few weeks I felt quite differently. He had sought me out, and he learned for the first time that I had six children living, and eight grandchildren, grand-children, and that I had been living with my daughter Molly since my husband hus-band died. "Tom," I said to him, "I don't mind telling you that I never loved my husband hus-band half so much as you." "Lizzie," he answered, "you haven't anything on me there." So we chatted together quite gayly, and nowadays Tom comes over pretty rsarly every afternoon. If he sees that I am asleep he goes away very softly, so as not to disturb me. Ana sometimes I only pretend to be asleep so that 1 can sit still and think and live in my memories. "Grandmother's flirtation," the grandchildren call our talks. It never enters their heads that, for all my six children and seventy-eight years, I am just as much interested in Tom as though he were again the dark-haired boy whose photograph, very faint and faded, stands on my bureau. At first, as I said, my heart was nearly broken. But then I used to sit out here in the sun and think things over. And gradually I seemed to work things out in my mind, and at first 1 was reconciled, and then happy, and now I am just like a girl in mind again. You see, as I was saying, folks are coming back to belief, though it is not the old certainty. Now I never regretted re-gretted marrying Jim, and I hope and am sure that I shall meet him again, and that whatever there was of common com-mon interest and affection between us will be renewed. But that doesn't shut me out from Tom. Now suppose I had married Tom. Would the eld romance, which exists still, in spite of my seventy-eight years, continue? Or would it have been frittered away with the cares of life, the bearing and rearing of my children, the friction of things and the struggles? I think it would have' been. That seems the strange thing about life the moment you begin to 'realize happiness you lose it. It all consists in the looking backward or looking forward. Now, what an adventure life ought to be, and was, and is becoming again, with the old faith coming back frv no "Dooonc-a T o m nlllto CllTP that it is this youth in our hearts, which never dies, no matter bow old we are, that is to be realized in the life to come. I am quite sure that then, at last, we shall find the happiness which we all try so hard to catch and somehow some-how miss. Well, then, does anyone mean to tell me that my heart won't be big enough to hold both my husband and Tom, in an existence where there is no marrying marry-ing or giving in marriage? It seems to me that there one will have all the romance of girlhood and all the joys of being a mother, and a grandmother too. I have put this idea into words rather crudely, not being a writer; but, anyhow, that was my conclusion, and I told Tom about it. You can't imagine how pleased it made me to know that he understood. "That is just how I have been feeling, feel-ing, my dear," he told me. "You see, when I heard you were married life seemed impossible for me. But by and by I began to find out that it has got to be lived, and, I tried to live it. My wife and I were very happy together. to-gether. And I thought often that if it had been you our children would have been different souls." "Yes," I told him. "I should be dreadfully unhappy without Polly and Dora and Mark and Philip and the two boys in Los Angeles." "But now we have each other as well as our own," he answered. I closed my eyes, because I wanted to think. I was casting over in my mind the different women I knew, and it seemed to me that whether they had married the right man or the wrong man it seemed pretty well to even itself out. And I thought of those who had never married at all, and what a load of experience there must be waiting for them in the next life. "For my part, Tom," I said, "I : would not have it any different. I am so glad I never married you and I used to think my heart was broken. "Same here," he answered, squeezing squeez-ing my hand, and then I saw a couple who were passing along the street look up and smile at us. "I'll be over tomorrow about the same time," said Tom, getting up and taking off his hat with the sweeping gesture he used to use. I watched him walk away toward his cottage. How pleasant it is to be alive, I thought. And how pleasant it is to be an old woman, with all one's troubles lived through already. |