Story of the Month: Do You Remember??

It was said to an aged woman:

— Were you not once a young girl? And she answered:

— I was a young girl, and I have forgotten....

Among the problems of the age is one that is nearly the same in every home: the day the children's wings harden and they surge forward to fly as they wish and as they please, the fathers and mothers take alarm and refuse to let their children leave the cages and fly with the winds...

It is hoped that fathers and mothers will find in the following tale some remedy for what ails them.

Do you remember??

Do you remember, my darling, the secondary school where we studied in the year 1911? Do you remember the laboratory where we were forever performing chemistry experiments that always failed, and where we went deep in coming to know one another?

Your family had come to live in our town — Oakwood — only a short time before, and your father was a businessman... As for my father, he had died, and I lived with my mother in Hancock Alley, in a house divided into two flats. We occupied one and rented out the other for thirty dollars a month. My mother sewed gowns for the wealthy ladies of the town and walked among people with her head held high, proud of her work... But you knew nothing of this; all you knew was that I was the son of a "dressmaker." Still, people admitted me into your circle of friends because I was "Jimmy" — Jimmy, captain of the football team and leader of the senior class.

When I told my mother that you had chosen me to escort you to the school dance, I saw her eyes cloud over for a moment; she knew that I thought of nothing but you, and she knew at the same time what an abyss separated "Franklin" Street from Hancock Alley. Yet she said nothing to me except that she was sorry I had no navy-blue suit to wear to the party. But I reassured her that there was no harm in my wearing my new gray suit.

When I went to escort you to the dance you were wearing a new blue dress, and on your shoulders something like a mist of sheer tulle, and in your hair threads of gold, so that your face showed through it all like a dark-hued rose. You stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at me without noticing my poor suit... And you must have seen in my eyes that look which a man keeps for the most sacred hours of his life.

At that moment your mother arrived. I did not sense "disapproval" in her glance; rather I felt that she was looking at me with sympathy and pity. There was a scarcely visible difference between her manner with me and her manner with the rest of your friends.

And we went on foot, you and I. I carried your dancing shoes for you in a velvet bag. You remember that automobiles were few in those days, and there were no garages, only stretches of green growth in front of the houses with their wide verandas.

We were still in the era of the little notebooks in which the girls set down the names of the dances, and opposite them the names of their partners; so I kept for myself eight of the twelve dances. When I handed the notebook back to you, you threw me a glance that nearly stopped the beating of my heart.

At the end of the last dance I saw gilded motes in your eyes, and it seemed to me that we were listening to music coming down from the stars.

Do you remember that dance hall? Admission for each evening was 25 cents, and the tram fare five cents. People walked in the moonlight along the pavement, and the daughters of the wealthy families among your friends knew that dance hall only by name — until that evening in June when the youth of "Franklin" Street condescended and came to make merry with the children of the common people.

It had been settled that you would travel the next day to spend the summer on an island your people owned in the province of "Maine," and that you would enter the university in the fall, and that I would be deprived of seeing you except on short holidays.

We left the dance hall and walked to the end of the pavement. We had only a few minutes to spend alone, for we had to return to town on the half-past-nine train; we had no more than a quarter of an hour as "provisions" for the whole summer!!

And this conversation passed between us:

— Tomorrow at this very hour you will be traveling on the train.

— I would rather stay here with you.

— I begin my work next week. The beginning will be nothing to speak of, but there are possibilities for the future. I have gone into electrical ventures, and I shall succeed. I must succeed.

— I know for certain that you will succeed!

Then you drew near me and said sweetly:

— Jim, I want you to come, at the end of the coming school year, to the students' party at the university where I shall be studying. Will you come?? Say — will you come??

I said:

— I will come.

And I took your hands in mine, and we stayed thus for some moments... Then you circled me with your arm, and lifted your head toward the silvered light of the stars, and your lips brushed my cheek with a light touch for the first time, and it seemed to us that the stars were falling to gather round us.

Then you said:

— I shall always remember this evening, my dear.

Did you remember it? Many things have passed since that night. The town of "Oakwood" has changed; the electric train has been done away with; the ornament of the green stretches of "Franklin" Street has been spoiled, replaced by passageways leading to ugly-looking garages, and the sounds of horns and the snorting of machines have come to trouble the quiet of the night. As for our little old school, it seems to me it gazes like a simpleton at the grand new school rising on the opposite side. And the young men have cast off the suits that showed the slimness of the waist and the breadth of the shoulders, and have exchanged them for loose sport clothes.

And the girls? They no longer wait for someone to escort them to the school dance; they hurry out with painted lips to the edge of the pavement, where the young men sit in open cars and receive them with an insolence they have mastered by dint of repetition...

At the end of July you wrote to me that your mother thought the correspondence should be lightened. After that I wrote no more than two letters a week.

In those days I was not earning much money, but the future belonged to the branch I had chosen: electricity. The specialists were debating a new application of electrical power and prophesying the sending of musical melodies through the air. I began working night and day, thinking of you always.

And one day you wrote me that your sister had told your father — with the terrible recklessness of children — that you were in love with me, that you spent your time dreaming, and that you excused yourself from going swimming in order to write to me. I was then counting the days left of the summer until I should see you, when you wrote that your family had decided to send you off straight to the university.

And your answers to my daily letters grew further and further apart. The university party at the end of the year was all the hope left to me. I supposed your mother had protested, but you had already invited me, and there the matter ended; so I bought a suit that was not handsome — being unable to buy anything more elegant — and rented a "dinner jacket."

We had planned in our letters that I would take the four-o'clock train and reach the city where you were studying at six o'clock, rent a room in an inn where I would put on my evening clothes, meet you at the dinner hour, and after the party board the train to New York so as to be at my work by morning.

For lack of money I traveled in an ordinary-class carriage, and in view of the high prices of the inns I rented a room in a private house.

At the students' residence you introduced me to your companions, and I found nothing to say; so you sat beside me, and you spoke little... I knew that my suit was not in the new style and that the shape of my shoes did not go with the dinner jacket....

That dinner! It was a long, drawn-out torment for me!

At last the girl students went up to the upper floor to fetch their wraps, while the young men were putting on black overcoats and white gloves. My brown checked overcoat struck a discordant note. And you came down, wrapped in a white evening cloak embroidered with silver threads. Never in my life had I seen you more beautiful...

You said:

— Some of the girls go to the party in a taxi. As for me, I prefer to walk with you to the dance hall.

Of course — I ought to have thought of the taxi.

The dance was held at the college, so we walked in the moonlight, your arm in mine. During the first dance I noticed that the girls wore flowers on their breasts. I ought to have brought you some flowers — but how was I to know duties of that kind!

I said:

— I am sorry there are no flowers on your dress!

— Jim! Flowers do not matter in the least. I...

And you leaned your head on my shoulder, and I held you for a moment as you pressed close to me, and I thought that that minute was the beginning of the end! Still, I managed to hold out to the end of the evening, and I tried to keep pace with your friends in their conversations; and if I failed, it was not for lack of will, but I was a stranger to the subjects of universities and student societies and plays and the rest...

And we danced together. But the music that evening did not come from above, from the stars. After the party you wanted to accompany me to the station, and in the carriage that carried us I confessed everything to you: the modest room where I had changed my clothes, and my hired coat. When I had finished, you said only these words:

— Oh, Jim! I wanted you to spend an hour of pleasure at this party, and I see now that you were never happy at all!

— That is the truth. I ought not to have come here, to where I feel myself a stranger.

The locomotive threw its lights along the rails, and I laid my hands on your shoulders and said:

— If it should happen one day that you think of me, my dear — will you remember how much I love you?

You closed your eyes and leaned toward me and said:

— Jim! Don't talk like that!

And it came to me that you did not want me to pour out all that was in me, so I opened my arms, knowing these were the last moments we would spend together. You hid yourself against my chest, and through your tears you said to me:

— Till we meet again, my dear.

★

The next day I wrote you a "formal" letter to thank you for your invitation, saying in it that I understood perfectly if you found no time to write. I waited a week for an answer and received nothing. The weeks passed, and nothing was left me of you but the memory.

My employers sent me to Chicago. The company flourished. The dream of sending music over the waves of the air moved along the road to fulfillment. My circumstances improved, so my mother left her sewing work and came to live with me.

★

Do you remember, beloved?

The years have passed — twenty-six full years. Tomorrow we celebrate the passing of twenty years since our marriage, because in the end I came back and found you! We met by chance on "Bart" Street, and I saw — once more — the golden motes in your eyes.. There in the street I began repeating in your hearing the sentence I had said to you on the station platform:

— If it should happen one day that you think of me, will you remember....

But you interrupted me and stretched out your arms to me — and I imagined that half the people in the town were looking at us — and you said:

— I remember perfectly, dear Jim, that I love you!

And we embraced. In the street there was an organ, one of those machines that fill the air with the ugliest kinds of music, but to us it was like the sweetest of Schubert's songs.

And today, my darling! You are wearing yourself out with worry over our daughter "Betty," and you fret as your mother used to fret over you. Our daughter is eighteen years old, and we believe she loves "Bill McKim." I beg you not to be too hard on this young man. You may decide something after you have read in these lines the story of us two. It is my gift to you on the day of our anniversary. I shall leave it now in your room, where you sleep.

Would it be possible for us to invite "Bill" to the dinner party we are giving at the club? It may happen that he feels himself a stranger in the presence of a man who has won the "Pulitzer" Prize, and a woman who is a deputy in the legislature, and the rest of our "great" guests. It may happen that he wears a hired "dinner jacket" and is unable to say what ought to be said.

But long ago you invited a young man of poor circumstances to the dance at the university where you were studying....

Do you remember, my darling???