Evening Star Newspaper, April 27, 1930, Page 96

First-Run Fic- tion by the Highest- Paid Short-Story - Writer in World. A Story of Age and Youth and QOur Modern Habits. T occurred to the Senator one evening, when half a dozen young men and women were twitting around him, that the at- titude of_ these younger people toward him would have amounted in words, to something like this: You wonderful old man! Eighty-eight years of age and in your right mind and apparently with your wits still about gou. We think you're wonderful. We reverence you for not being something that has broken down and needs to be swept up in the dust- pan. That was precisely, come to analyze it, the way the world behaved. Isn’t he wonderful! Look how spry he is. Senator, are you going to dance with me? Catch him napping, if you can! Want to kmow the youngest man in this crowd? Meet the Senator! Exhibit A. Meet the Senator! Out of question to be treated in a way that was not special and deferential te his great age. How elaborate everybody was in manmer toward him. And how elaborately, if you were 88 and spry, you tried to keep up the hallu- cination of youth. Senator, don’t you ever sleep? Nonsense, I leave it to you youngsters to meed sleep. I'm never tired. ¥ ER tired! Sometimes it seemed to the Senator, as he climbed into his evening clothes, that the old bones would sag in a up in a dustpan by a servant in the morning. Never tired! Sometimes at dinner, surrounded by his children, grandchildren, guests, it seemed %0 him that the room began to wave and the young ones are too set in your ways. Ist*t he wonderful! Can’t keep up with him. glipping, the trick was to discipline it. Never forget a name. Sign of bad memory. All right in the young, but sign of decay in age. Never Sign of senility. youth. Reminisce, but seldom. with current events, and compare them favor- ably, if at all, with the “good old days.” It was a strange loneliness, being 88. Crowds of progeny and adoring youth about ome, but all the real people one had known lying in those minaret cities called cemeteries. Prac- tically the entire universe with whom the Sen- #tor had been young, and with whom he had @rown into ripe age, had folded its hands and closed its eyes. Even the contemporary old people were of a generation younger than he. Eighty-eight gave you an isolation beyond the explaining. You were of one world and you had to pretend that you were of another. And pet it kept you young. Oh yes, it kept you young. Tl_iE curious part of it all, although you never explain that, because there was no one Jeft living who could. understand, was that it was easy to be reckless with what was left of lfe, because the idea of death had become so simple. Nothing much to dread. On the con- trary, a vast and beautiful reunion to con- template. Another fantastic aspect of this was that so ny who were dead belonged also to the youngsters. Men and women, dozens of them who had died in their forties and fifties and even sixties would be as young to the Sen- Mk in death, when the time came for the eunion, as they had been in life. X will be older than almost any one in the world of death just as I am in the world of lifel “Rubbish,” said the Senator aloud. “Getting morbid.” Never associate with old age! Another of the Senator's slogans for sidestepping the im- plications of the years. There were, of course, emrtain exceptions. Twice a year he journeyed % the home of a granddaughter to visit her Dedridden octogenarian father-in-law, a friend of half a lifetime. Ever s0 often, too, he found @ccasion to visit the white-haired aunt by mar- THE SUNDAY $TAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, APRIL 27, 1930, “Oh, I say, Senator, don’t you go and desert me for that pretty blond. You.promised to walk the deck with me™ riage of one of his soms. A beautiful, plump, old creature, who sat all day like a contented cat, on the sun-drenched rooms and on the sun- drenched terraces of her lovely house and let herself fatten on well being. Poor old Aunt Ella. Can’t make her stir. Sits and soaks herself in sun. Knits sillies for old fat maltese cat. Can’t you shame her, Senator! You couldn’t shame a great, plump, purring old woman like that. She was for all the world American Navy’s Big Berthas. Continued from Eleventh Poge October 21 gun No. 3 fired the first shot for overhead looking for . A severe German bombardment followed, and four sailors were wounded, one dying a little later. THI next day these guns fired 10 shots apiece into a group of Germans concentrating at Mangiennes, about 26,000 yards away. Shortly afterward gun No. 2, which had come down from near Laon, got into position and opened fire also, picking Montmedy as its objective and undergoing a German bombardment. The gun’s headquarters car and one berthing car were blown off the track during this exchange. We were right in the war now, and the gobs and 2 were sent to the Luneville. On November 1 we all vital junctions of Montmedy and Longuyon. At the same time hundreds of thousands of doughboys were advancing through the Argonne Forest, making it especially important for the Germans to have the use of those railroads. Our shells were coming dowru just when and where they were most needed. The next day we fired an even hundred shells. On the day following, after sending back for more ammunition, we concentrated on two smaller junctions at Louppy and Remoiville, where German troops were concentrating. On the day following we turned our atiention to Montmedy again and set fire to the railroad yards there. The Germans gave us a brisk counterfire that day, and another sailor was wounded. E continued daily thereafter, firing all the shells we could get. We spent most of November 10 waiting for ammuntion, and gave the Germans 10 final reminders on the morn- ing of Armistice day, November 11—firing our last shell at 2 minutes before 11, 5o that it struck just a few seconds before 11 o'clock. The next day we went up to see what we had hit. We found we had hit the German 7th Army headquarters, causing it to move hur- riedly. We had hit a loaded troop train, too, part in the war had been done, and we had Gen. Pershing’s thanks, contained in a special order he sent us shortly after the armistice. (Cepyright, 193%0.) End Peril in Gas Well Test. The full rush of the gas is aiso harmful to the well and likely to aff ously the future output. In addition, menace of fire is present when the comes for a time surcharged with gas. Recently in Oklahoma during the testing of some wells three were tested successfully by the pitot tube method, but the fourth caught fire with a heavy loss. . The back-pressure system has been found to be nearly as accurate as the pitot tube and eliminates both waste and danger. American Sodium Products. SODIUII compounds, excluding common salt, were produced im this country to the total value of $6,107,666 during the past year. This includes sodium carbonate, sodium .sulphate, sodium bicarbonate, trona and sodium borate. > like nothing but a maltese in the sun, sleek, contented, superior. Come out of it, Ella. Be a young one. Dance! Dance, my hind foot, Senator. You cam make your old bones play at being 20. Mine are 75 and I'm showing them a good time. Nothing to do about a woman like that! The Summers were a nuisance. No use talke ing, the boat trips were a trial. A man was supposed to be entitled to look upon his holiday as a period of rest. But nothing of the sort, If you had the reputation of being the youngest man on board the floating palace of an ocean liner, there was no such thing as relaxation. Young ones knocking on the cabin door. Come on, Senator, we're all waiting for you to come up on board and show who is the best shuffie- board player on this ship. Saving me a dance for tonight, Senator? Oh, I say, Senator, don't you go and desert me for that pretty blonde. You promised to walk the deck with me this evening. ES, the Summers were a trial. Same way at Antibes, or Paris, or Deauville or wherever youth and beauty flitted. Fight ont Don't let the years so much as get a toe in the wedge of the door. Fight on. Sometimes the tiredness became just a numb- ness and that made it easier, except you dared not relax. The memory had to be kept oiled, the repartee flawless and the tendency te reminisce held firmly in check. Fight on! You're not an individual any more, Sen:;‘, Aunt Ella told him once, sitting on the porch in her huge upholstere® chair and daubing arnica along her swollen rheumatic knuckles. You're the prize exhibit. You're like the dog- faced man and the fat lady and the two- headed girl. You're the old-boy wonder. Can’t grow old. The boy wonder who was cursed with the inability to grow oid. How she cackled. In age you had to guard against that. Without your being aware, the laugh could become a cackle. 5 Then fell the nine days wonder. Almost like the one-horse shay, the Senator awoke one morning too tired to face the day of the frivolie ties, the trivialities, the repartee and the chal- lenge of youth. His bones hurt. His spirit hurt. His soul hurt. The young and younger generation about him declare they can trace his disintegration to the day. Almost the hour. They blame Aunt Elia. The facetious patter is that she vamped him at 75 Be that as it may, the Senator and Aunt Ella sit now sometimes six and seven hours on end in the great sunny rooms or on the wide, sunny terraces of the beautiful country house. The Senator has relaxed so outrage- ously to his rheumatism that Aunt Ella says of him somewhat testily that it is indecent surrender. The curious part of it is that with all his shamelessly revealed infirmities, gout, joiné trouble, jaundice and a leaking heart, the Sen= ator somehow looked betier. Relaxed, is Aund Ella's way of putting it. Call it what you will, says the Senater, it® solid comfort, Being 88 has enormous ocom= pensations, if youll just let yourself be 88.: (Copyright, 180.) -