THE VAGABOND

The only light was from the candles and they were set close down to the tables so that the floor was in shadow. That was what made the huge birthday cake seem as though it were floating through the air when the hostess carried it through the crooked aisles up to the high table. A gleaming white mountain covered with--thirty candles, the Vagabond would say. A cake of many candles.

But not enough, because there should have been eighty-three. It was the thirty candles which showed how old eighty-three is. The huge white birthday cake wasn't up to the job it had undertaken; it was slacking with only thirty candles, or something like that, and probably the exact number didn't even have any mathematical relationship to eighty-three. Eighty-three is very old.

Vag thought Youth is always told that it should pay great respect to Age and it always does, but inside it usually shrugs or maybe even sneers and if it does have a feeling of respect it is only because of an externally imposed habit and not because of an honest spontaneous sentiment. Usually, perhaps, but that was not so tonight. In these surroundings it was impossible not to feel something like awe for that figure slowly getting up to cut the cake.

Maybe it was his immense dignity. He was still the center of everything and the head of the table, among those men whom he once guided and counselled. He was still the ruler standing underneath his towers and surveying monuments called by his name. He didn't cut the cake skillfully or neatly, but his actions seemed to have the slowness of deliberation and dignity rather than impotence.

Or maybe it was his aloofness. He was a part of the past and gloried in it and was content to have called a close to the chapter he had written in the book of affairs. The Herald man covering Lowell's birthday last night had said "He is living in retirement at his Back Bay home" and he might as well have stopped there; and the editor calling for a cut to go with the story had been handed an old picture dug from deep in the files. The remoteness of another day and another way of life.