At best we can, indeed we must, acquiesce in the fact
that the only sorrow to be found in our hearts for aged persons is a
sort of gentle sorrow, such as the year itself administers to our
senses in autumn, when we come home with our hands full of the
beautiful single dahlias that the Dutchmen loved and painted, bound up
with sprays of reddening creepers; we come home along the sunny roads
over which the yellow beeches lean so pathetically, and we are sad for
the year, but we do not grieve passionately; our hearts do not break.
Then again we cannot grieve as the conventions would have us
grieve--in strange dress; the very fact of wearing crepe and black
gloves alienates us from our real selves; we are no longer ourselves,
we are mummers engaged in the performance of a masque. I could have
mourned my mother better without crepe. "There never has been invented
anything so horrible as the modern funeral," I cried out. A picture of
the hearse and the mutes rose up in my mind, and it was at that very
moment that the song of the bird broke out again, and just above my
head in the larches an ugly, shrilling song of about a dozen notes
with an accent on the two last, a stupid, tiresome stave that never
varied. "What bird can it be," I cried out, "that comes to interrupt
my meditations?" and getting up I tried to discover it amid the
branches of the tree under which I had been lying.
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