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| Photo Courtesy of splitshire.com |
An evening of sweet contentment at the end of a busy week...a golden place outside of time where worries and concerns melt away, and friends are truly happy in each others company. Sometimes we try too hard to create these special moments. The magical times in life that we always remember often come when we least expect them. The following passage is a remembrance of a warm, happy get together with a group of seemingly random friends almost 100 years ago, on a rainy night in California....
Roses and Rain
Last night we sat in the quiet room--a few friends together--and heard the wind rattling the palm leaves outside in the
garden, like some ghostly senorita clicking a pair of invisible castanets in
tune to some haunting rhythm.
The fire burned on the hearth, a fire of eucalyptus logs, with now and
then a branch of aromatic leaves, flaming suddenly into leaping life and
filling the room with their pungent and somehow exotic perfume.
We put out the bright lights from the center of the room, and let the
shadows fall from the little gleaming lamps that are like fire-flies, flitting
in the dusk like so many swiftly passing thoughts and pleasant memories.
There we were, the young couple so dead in love with each other, and so
full of the joy of living. Sweet Sixteen, a little terrified at her vague
glimpse of life—Twenty-one, virile and modest and somehow eagerly hopeful.
The Home Woman, the Woman of the World, the Artist, the Genius, the
Singer and the Priest. A strange company, strangely mixed, and yet there we sat
in the quiet little room—together, like passengers on a raft picked up from the
wild sea and held together by some strange accident of fate.
We talked, not of politics, not of war or of diplomacy—not even of the
high cost of living, or of the effect of the vote upon women.
We talked of books and poetry, and of music, and one told a quaint
little story of a wounded pigeon, and the rescue of it, and the fire burned and
the wind sang, and gradually the stress of the world and the anxiety and
restless, uneasy ambition of it fell from us like an outworn cloak. And there
we were, like little children, talking together in the twilight of some great
primeval forest.
And one sang—a simple song of love and memory and tears.
“Roses and rain” and the Artist smiled, and
the Woman of the World sighed, and there were tears in the eyes of the Home
Woman.
The Genius it was who sang—and the Singer sat by the fire and listened.
The Young Wife’s hand stole to the hand of her Husband, and the Priest
sat like one in a deep reverie. Was he thinking of the roses that bloomed in
the dooryard of his home across the sea, and the fragrance of them in the sweet
June rain?
And we didn’t care who was elected or who was defeated, and somewhere,
far down in the city below, the (news) boys were calling “extra, extra,
extra!”—all about something or other very important, which concerned us not in
the very least.
And the Singer was generous, and poured out for us like a libation on the
altar of friendship his voice of molten silver—French songs he sang full of the
quick and glancing grace of a fountain leaping in the moonlight. German lieder,
simple and brooding, like the lullabies a mother sings to her child. Italian,
too, he sang, and the room glowed with the fire and the passion of the melting
music of Italy.
“Eileen Allana”—how he sang it—the simple old ballad, and how we drank
every lilting note of it, like thirsty travelers in a dry and arid desert.
And so the quiet evening spent itself, and at the end she sang again,
the woman with the strange dark eyes—“Roses and Rain”—and we were one with the
sunshine and the dew and knew again the sweet and rapturous pang of youth and
moonlight and the mystery of the stars.
“Roses and Rain”—the wind in the palm trees, the fire on the hearth,
dear faces in the soft dimness of the quiet room. What is there sweeter, what
more beautiful, what more to be gained in life than these?
--from Roses and Rain by Annie Laurie (1920)
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| Illustration from Godey's Lady's Magazine, January 1880 |
