Seeing The Old Town

( Originally Published 1922 )

I'VE been back seeing the old town. The old town where I served the first years of my hard apprenticeship to life—alas! not yet completed. The old town where, as a boy, I dreamed those bright early dreams whose fading into gray futility makes the dull burden of every man's regret.

It may be that my dreams were more varied and fantastic than those of the average younker, for I was the fool o' fancy, with a poet's wild heart in my breast. God knows what I promised myself in that long-vanished time of youth which yet was instantly vivified and present to me as I trod the streets of the old town. I felt like one about to see a ghost —the ghost of my young self; and I shrank consciously from meeting it, with this bitter-sweet pang of disillusion at my heart. I could not more sensibly have feared a living presence. Alas, what one of us all is worthy, after the heavy account of years, to confront the ghost of his candid youth ?—what one but must bow the head before that pitying yet reproachful Memory?

This feeling took such strong hold upon me that soon I hastened away from the too familiar squares and corners, so poignantly reminiscent of that other Me, and went to the hotel facing Main Street. But even here, seated at a window and elbowed by a group of story-swapping drummers, I could not free my-self from the spell of old memories. Youth with its hundred voices cried to me; the past and the present became at once strangely con-fused, yet separable; and I was set to the painful task of tracing and identifying my younger self in the crowd of passers-by.

And I did find that boy again—oh yes! I did find him in spite of the lapse of many changing years and all that Time had wrought within and without me since he and I were one. I found him, though he was long shy and hesitated to come out of the shadows; holding back timidly and looking on me with tender yet doubtful eyes—ah God! I knew whence the doubt. But at last he came fully, careless of the roaring drummers or knowing himself to be unseen; and I held his hand in mine, while a sweet sorrow beat against my heart in the thought of what might have been and now could never be. And after the kind relief of tears, we talked in whispers a long time there by the window, no one noticing us; and ere he went back into the shadow he touched my fore-head lightly with his lips, leaving me as one whom God has assoiled.

The old town was but little changed, only it seemed smaller, like all places we have known in our youth and been long absent from. The Main street, where the working boys and girls flirt and promenade in an endless chain, still slouched the whole length of the town, with the railroad between it and the river; no difference, except that it was better paved than in my time, and the clanging trolleys ran instead of the ancient bob-tailed horse cars. There were a few new shops or strange names over the old ones—no other changes of consequence. The same old town !—the boy of twenty years ago would not have been phased in the least.

But I was, and the fact was due to the changes which Time had written upon so many faces I had known; fair young girls turned into full-blown matrons, vaunting their offspring with no lack of words, or withered old maids looking askance and shrinking from recognition; striplings who had shot up into solid man-hood, and whom you were puzzled to place; broken old men whom you recalled in their vigorous prime; all the varied human derelicts of the storm and stress of twenty years. Oh, it makes a man bethink himself to watch the pro-cession go by in the old town.

Certainly, if you wish to get a true line on yourself, go back to the old town. Nothing else will do the trick. Your glass is a liar leagued with your vanity. Your wife a loving flatterer who says the thing that is not. Your children will never tell you how old you are beginning to look. Your daily intimates and coevals are concerned to keep up the same illusion for themselves. You deceive yourself, know it, and are happy in the deception. There is only one way for you to learn the "bitter, wholesome truth", or, in other words, to get a fair look at the clock—go back to the old town !

There is some humor, too, in going back, as I find from my visits at an interval of five or six years. Always I am most heartily and noisily greeted by men who have no use for me except to "knock" me, whom the sight or sound of my name exasperates, to whom my tiny bit of success is poison, and who struggle on bravely with the hope of seeing me finally land where I deserve to be and am, as they fervently believe, irretrievably headed. We do each other good, for if I were to. die, these men would lose one of the sweetest motives of their existence; and I, knowing this, am eager to live on and disappoint them.

Last time I went back I saw one of these friendly fellows at a distance of a block, and he kept his glad hand out at the risk of paralysis, until we came together. Then how he laughed with pleasure, and my goodness, what a grip he gave me! I had to laugh with him and return his grip, so far as my feeble strength would allow. In an acquaintance of over twenty years this fellow had never offered, me the slightest proof of his friendship, save, as I have said, to "knock" me; and now a dear friend of mine hung modestly back while he crushed me in his iron embrace. When I was going away at the end of my visit, this terrible enemy came to the nine o'clock train to see me off and spoiled the leave-taking of my real friends. There is irony of the same brand elsewhere, but you will not see it to such naked advantage as in the old town. . . .

The saddest experience one can have in re-visiting the old town is to hear suddenly of the death of some friend of one's youth, who though separated from one by long years of absence, must ever share in the romance of that enchanted period. I was so to learn of the loss of a friend who had been very dear to me in the old days. Together we had trudged the Main Street of the old town, by night and by day, making plans for the future, few of which were realized either for him or for me.

The friendships of youth are sacred. Mature life has nothing to offer in their place. Men agree to like each other for social or business reasons; often, paradoxically, because they fear each other. The heart is not touched in this hollow alliance—it is a pact of interest and selfishness. Youth and trust, age and cynicism —thus are they paired.

I know well that one or two young friend-ships or frank elections of the heart have yielded me much of the pain and thrill and rapture of that sentiment between the sexes which we call love. I know that I was several years older ere the voice of a girl had leave to thrill me like the tone of this dear lost friend; that I suffered as keenly during an occasional boyish miff with him as in my first genuine love quarrels; that I would have risked life and limb to please him, and could conceive of nothing sweeter than his praise; that I can not think of him even now without a pain at the heart which I have not the skill to analyze. And though I saw little of him for many years, and there was no attempt to follow up our ancient friendship—our paths lying wide apart in every sense—and though he died a man of middle age, I can but think of him—taking no note at all of the years that lie between—as a bright-haired, laughing youth; and so mourn him with a sorrow of the heart which proves a silent witness there during all the years to the truth of our early affection.

There is something divine, though we but dimly glimpse it, in the unavowed, almost unconscious persistence of these sacred ties of our youth, these precious legacies from the days that are no more, whose light shines with a white lustre that belongs to them alone.

Sleep well, my friend! . . .

I was not sorry to have seen the old town again, though it gave me but a sad pleasure at best, and I was glad when my short leave was up. And yet that singular thrill of walking where once you knew and were known of every-body, and where still, because of some slight rumors from the great outlying world, a flattering village curiosity attends you, is worth going a long journey to feel.