Nineteen Impressions/The Contemporaries
THE CONTEMPORARIES
THE old lady by the fire-place looked up and smiled. A simple, childlike pleasure shone in her bright, unseeing eyes; the furrows about her almost invisible mouth were twisted into a simper of infantile satisfaction. She held up a tottering, wrinkled finger.
"Hush!" she said in her thin, delicate voice. "Hush! Someone singing!"
No one took the least notice of her.
She was incredibly old. The great room was crowded with her descendants; and the wonderful baby of eight months, who had just been brought in, was the grandson of the old lady's granddaughter.
"Five generations," remarked the old man who sat facing his mother across the splendid width of the deep fire-place. "Five generations," he repeated mumbling.
His daughter leaned over her father's chair. "Yes, dear," she said, humouring him, "and now I'm a grandmother." She straightened her back and looked down the room, but her first grandchild was hidden in the throng of admiring relations.
The old man nodded and puckered his mouth. "D'ye notice, child," he said, "that there's only one at each end?"
His daughter showed her perplexity. She wondered sometimes whether her father was not approaching his dotage; whether in another year or two he would not reach the condition of that old, old woman on the other side of the fire-place; deaf, almost blind, altogether senile and foolish.
"One at each end, father?" she repeated, with a slightly condescending smile.
"Aye, aye!" nodded the old man, with a touch of irritability; "there's only your grandmother left at one end, and only this infant come at the other."
"Oh! yes. Of course. How odd!" his daughter agreed, pretending a small interest. She laughed mechanically, and then said, "I must just go down and pay my devoirs to the youngest of the race."
The old man, her father, was muttering something to himself.
The infant was making slow progress up the long room. His uncles and aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts, and his cousins in many degrees were all paying court to him. He appeared to be enjoying his reception, unembarrassed by the crowd. He sat up in his mother's arms and smiled, placidly tolerant of the efforts to propitiate and amuse him.
His grandmother, coming down from the fire-place, was engaged long before she reached him. Her son was there, standing by one of the tall windows, and he turned and spoke to her as she passed.
"How's the old man, mater?" he asked. "Isn't this crowd rather too much for him?"
"He seems very well," his mother said; and added, "a little queer at times, perhaps." She repeated her father's remark about the representation of the two extreme generations.
Her son smiled. "Well, he's over eighty, you know, mater," he said, and then, struck by an afterthought, he continued, "And, by Jove, there's the old lady beyond him. One forgets her, she's a relic of the forgotten past."
His mother pursed her mouth and looked back up the room. "Poor old grannie," she said; "for all intents and purposes she has been dead for ten years. Just now, when I was up there with your grandfather, she suddenly held up her finger and said, 'Hush! Someone singing!'"
The young man laughed. "How odd!" was his only comment.
The grandmother met the latest representative of her race in the middle of the great room.
"Oh! let me have him," she said to her daughter-in-law. But as his mother made a movement to surrender him, the corners of his mouth dropped and he gripped suddenly at her breast.
"I expect he's a little tired and excited," she explained. "There are so many relations for him to shake hands with."
"Never mind," said his grandmother. She smiled, and her gentle finger invaded the soft pleats of the infant's little neck. And when he found that he was not to be dethroned he smiled again and gurgled.
"You must take him up to father," she said.
"Of course," her daughter-in-law agreed, and the procession moved slowly on up the room.
"A curious meeting," remarked the woman of the middle generation to her younger brother.
He stroked his beard, which the cares of office had already streaked with grey. "A reaching out across the gulf of time," he said. "When one remembers that the old man was born in the reign of William the Fourth—before the Reform Bill …"
"You forget grannie," his sister put in.
"Heavens, yes!" he acknowledged. "She came before Waterloo. More than a century between those two, Catherine. And we stand in the middle of the bridge, and can speak to neither of them."
His sister raised her eyebrows.
"Not to their minds," he explained. "Not one of us in this room here can convey our thoughts to the old lady or to that infant. They are alone, those two, and divided from each other by an unthinkable span of years. If it were possible for them to communicate to each other they could not have a single thought in common."
"We are all very serious this afternoon," his sister said, as they joined the diminished group about her father's chair.
"It is a great occasion," he answered.
The old man poked a trembling finger at his great-grandson and the infant smiled that faintly condescending smile of his, as if from his throne he acknowledged the slightly foolish adulation of his courtiers.
"He's rather tired," his mother explained.
"But you must show him to grannie before he goes," said his great-uncle. "This is a great occasion the meeting of the centuries."
"Oh, yes; show him to grannie," agreed his grandmother; "and then he can go upstairs."
The old lady by the fire-place looked up and smiled. A simple, childlike pleasure shone in her bright, unseeing eyes; the furrows about her almost invisible mouth were twisted into a simper of infantile satisfaction. She held up a tottering wrinkled finger.
"Hush!" she said in her thin, delicate voice. "Hush! Someone singing."
The face of the infant curiously changed. The smile was smoothed from his puckered mouth; as sudden attention dawned in his eyes. He struggled to sit up in his mother's arms. He raised a tiny hand and pointed upwards.
"He's imitating her," whispered his grandmother.
But the old lady and the infant were looking into each other's eyes.
They understood.
A momentary silence had fallen upon the crowd of people moving in that great room.
1913.