A REVELATION
"And because of these things, to the keen old physician and student of
life, the boy was a revelation of that best part of himself--that best
part of the race."
It happened on the Doctor's first trip to the Ozarks.
Martha says that everything with the Doctor begins and ends with fishing.
Martha has a way of saying such things as that. In this case she is more
than half right for the Doctor does so begin and end most things.
Whenever there were grave cases to think out, knotty problems to solve,
or important decisions to make, it was his habit to steal away to a
shady nook by the side of some quiet, familiar stream. And he confidently
asserts that to this practice more than to anything else he owes his
professional success, and his reputation for sound, thoughtful judgment
on all matters of moment.
"And why not?" he will argue when in the mood. "It is your impulsive,
erratic, thoughtless fellow who goes smashing, trashing and banging
about the field and woods with dogs and gun. Your true thinker slips
quietly away with rod and line, and while his hook is down in the deep,
still waters, or his fly is dancing over the foaming rapids and swiftly
swirling eddies, his mind searches the true depths of the matter and
every possible phase of the question passes before him."
For years the Doctor had heard much of the fishing to be had in the
more unsettled parts of the Ozarks, but with his growing practice he
could find leisure for no more than an occasional visit to nearby
streams. But about the time that Martha began telling him that he was
too old to stay out all day on the wet bank of a river, and Dr. Harry
had come to relieve him of the heavier and more burdensome part of his
practice, a railroad pushed its way across the mountain wilderness. The
first season after the road was finished the Doctor went to cast his
hook in new waters.
In all these after years those days so full of mystic beauty have lived
in the old man's memory, the brightest days of all his life. For it was
there he met the Boy--there in the Ozark hills, with their great ridges
clothed from base to crest with trees all quivering and nodding in the
summer breeze, with their quiet valleys, their cool hollows and lovely
glades, and their deep and solemn woods. And the streams! Those Ozark
streams! The Doctor wonders often if there can flow anywhere else such
waters as run through that land of dreams.
The Doctor left the train at a little station where the railroad crosses
White River, and two days later he was fishing near the mouth of Fall
Creek. It was late in the afternoon. The Boy was passing on his way home
from a point farther up the stream. Not more than twelve, but tall and
strong for his age, he came along the rough path at the foot of the bluff
with the easy movement and grace of a young deer. He checked a moment
when he saw the Doctor, as a creature of the forest would pause at first
sight of a human being. Then he came on again, his manner and bearing
showing frank interest, and the clear, sunny face of him flushing a bit
at the presence of a stranger.
"Hello," said the Doctor, with gruff kindness, "any luck?"
The boy's quick smile showed a set of teeth--the most perfect the
physician had ever seen, and his young voice was tuned to the music of
the woods, as he answered, "I have caught no fish, sir."
By these words and the light in his brown eyes the philosopher knew him
instantly for a true fisherman. He noted wonderingly that the lad's
speech was not the rude dialect of the backwoods, while he marveled at
the depth of wisdom in one so young. How incidental after all is the
catching of fish, to the one who fishes with true understanding. The
boy's answer was both an explanation and a question. It explained that
he did not go fishing for fish alone; and it asked of the stranger a
declaration of his standing--why did he go fishing? What did he mean by
fisherman's luck?
The Doctor deliberated over his reply, while slowly drawing in his line
to examine the bait. Meanwhile the boy stood quietly by regarding him
with a wide, questioning look. The man realized that much depended upon
his next word.
Then the lad's youth betrayed him into eagerness. "Have you been farther
up the river just around the bend, where the giant cottonwoods are, and
the bluffs with the pines above, and the willows along the shore? Oh, but
it's fine there! Much better than this."
He had given the stranger his chance. If the Doctor was to be admitted
into this boy's world he must now prove his right to citizenship. Looking
straight into the boy's brown eyes, the older fisherman asked, "A better
place to catch fish?"
He laughed aloud--a clear, clean, boyish laugh of understanding, and
throwing himself to the ground with the easy air of one entirely at home,
returned, "No, sir, a better place to fish." So it was settled, each
understanding the other.
An hour later when the shadow of the mountain came over the water, the
boy sprang to his feet with an exclamation, "It's time that I was going,
mother likes for me to be home for supper. I can just make it."
But the Doctor was loth to let him go. "Where do you live?" he asked.
"Is it far?"
"Oh, no, only about six miles, but the trail is rough until you strike
the top of Wolf Ridge."
"Humph! You can't walk six miles before dark."
"My horse is only a little way up the creek," he answered, "or at least
he should be." Putting his fingers to his lips he blew a shrill whistle,
which echoed and re-echoed from shore to shore along the river, and was
answered by a loud neigh from somewhere in the ravine through which Fall
Creek reaches the larger stream. Again the boy whistled, and a black
pony came trotting out of the brush, the bridle hanging from the saddle
horn. "Tramp and I can make it all right, can't we old fellow?" said the
boy, patting the glossy neck, as the little horse rubbed a soft muzzle
against his young master's shoulder.
While his companion was making ready for his ride the Doctor selected
four of the largest of his catch--black bass they were--beauties. "Here,"
he said, when the lad was mounted, "take these along."
He accepted graciously without hesitation, and by this the Doctor knew
that their fellowship was firmly established. "Oh, thank you! Mother is
so fond of bass, and so are father and all of us. This is plenty for a
good meal." Then, with another smile, "Mother likes to fish, too; she
taught me."
The Doctor looked at him wistfully as he gathered up the reins, then
burst forth eagerly with, "Look here, why can't you come back tomorrow?
We'll have a bully time. What do you say?"
He lowered his hand. "Oh, I would like to." Then for a moment he
considered, gravely, saying at last, "I think I can meet you here day
after tomorrow. I am quite sure father and mother will be glad for me to
come when I tell them about you."
Was ever a fat old Doctor so flattered? It was not so much the boy's
words as his gracious manner and the meaning he unconsciously put into
his exquisitely toned voice.
He had turned his pony's head when the old man shouted after him once
more. "Hold on, wait a moment, you have not told me your name. I am Dr.
Oldham from Corinth. I am staying at the Thompson's down the river."
"My name is Daniel Howitt Matthews," he answered. "My home is the old
Matthews place on the ridge above Mutton Hollow."
Then he rode away up the winding Fall Creek trail.
The Doctor spent the whole of the next day near the spot where he had met
the boy, fearing lest the lad might come again and not find him. He even
went a mile or so up the little creek half expecting to meet his young
friend, wondering at himself the while, that he could not break the spell
the lad had cast over him. Who was he? He had told the Doctor his name,
but that did not satisfy. Nor, indeed, did the question itself ask what
the old man really wished to know. The words persistently shaped
themselves--_What_ is he? To this the physician's brain made answer
clearly enough--a boy, a backwoods boy, with unusual beauty and strength
of body, and uncommon fineness of mind; yet with all this, a boy.
But that something that sits in judgment upon the findings of our brain,
and, in lofty disregard of us, accepts or rejects our most profound
conclusions, refused this answer. It was too superficial. It was not, in
short, an answer. It did not in any way explain the strange power that
this lad had exerted over the Doctor.
"Me," he said to himself, "a hard old man calloused by years of
professional contact with mankind and consequent knowledge of their
general cussedness! Huh! I have helped too many hundreds of children
into this world, and have carried too many of them through the measles,
whooping-cough, chicken-pox and the like to be so moved by a mere boy."
The Thompsons could have told him about the lad and his people, but the
Doctor instinctively shrank from asking them. He felt that he did not
care to be told about the boy--that in truth no one could tell him about
the boy, because he already knew the lad as well as he knew himself.
Indeed the feeling that he already knew the boy was what troubled the
Doctor; more, that he had always lived with him; but that he had never
before met him face to face. He felt as a blind man might feel if, after
living all his life in closest intimacy with someone, he were suddenly
to receive his sight and, for the first time, actually look upon his
companion's face.
In the years that have passed since that day the Doctor has learned that
the lad was to him, not so much a mystery as a revelation--the revelation
of an unspoken ideal, of a truth that he had always known but never fully
confessed even to himself, and that lies at last too deeply buried
beneath the accumulated rubbish of his life to be of any use to him or to
others. In the boy he met this hidden, secret, unacknowledged part of
himself, that he knows to be the truest, most precious and most sacred
part, and that he has always persistently ignored even while always
conscious that he can no more escape it than he can escape his own life.
In short, Dan Matthews is to the Doctor that which the old man feels he
ought to have been; that which he might have been, but never now can be.
It was still early in the forenoon of the following day when the Doctor
heard a cheery hail, and the boy came riding out of the brush of the
little ravine to meet his friend who was waiting on the river bank. As
the lad sprang lightly to the ground, and, with quick fingers, took some
things from the saddle, loosed the girths and removed the pony's bridle,
the physician watched him with a slight feeling of--was it envy or
regret? "You are early," he said.
The boy laughed. "I would have come earlier if I could," Then, dismissing
the little horse, he turned eagerly, "Have you been there yet--to that
place up the river?"
"Indeed I have not," said the Doctor, "I have been waiting for you to
show me."
He was delighted at this, and very soon was leading the way along the
foot of the bluff to his favorite fishing ground.
It is too much to attempt the telling of that day: how they lay on the
ground beneath the giant-limbed cottonwoods, and listened to the waters
going past; how they talked of the wild woodland life about them, of
flower and tree, and moss and vine, and the creatures that nested and
denned and lived therein; how they caught a goodly catch of bass and
perch, and the Doctor, pulling off his boots, waded in the water like
another boy, while the hills echoed with their laughter; and how, when
they had their lunch on a great rock, an eagle watched hungrily from his
perch on a dead pine, high up on the top of the bluff.
When the shadow of the mountain was come once more and in answer to the
boy's whistle the black pony had trotted from the brush to be made ready
for the evening ride, the Doctor again watched his young companion
wistfully.
When he was ready, the boy said, "Father and mother asked me to tell you,
sir, that they--that we would be glad to have you come to see us before
you leave the hills." Seeing the surprise and hesitation of the Doctor,
he continued with fine tact, "You see I told them all about you, and they
would like to know you too. Won't you come? I'm sure you would like my
father and mother, and we would be so glad to have you. I'll drive over
after you tomorrow if you'll come."
Would he _go_! Why the Doctor would have gone to China, or Africa, or
where would he not have gone, if the boy had asked him.
That visit to the Matthews' place was the beginning of a friendship that
has never been broken. Every year since, the Doctor has gone to them for
several weeks and always with increasing delight. Among the many
households that, in his professional career, he has been privileged to
know intimately, this home stands like a beautiful temple in a world of
shacks and hovels. But it was not until the philosopher had heard from
Mrs. Matthews the story of Dad Howitt that he understood the reason. In
the characters of Young Matt and Sammy, in their home life and in their
children, the physician found the teaching of the old Shepherd of the
Hills bearing its legitimate fruit. Most clearly did he find it in
Dan--the first born of this true mating of a man and woman who had never
been touched by those forces in our civilization which so dwarf and
cripple the race, but who had been taught to find in their natural
environment those things that alone have the power to truly refine and
glorify life.
Understanding this, the Doctor understood Dan. The boy was well born; he
was natural. He was what a man-child ought to be. He did not carry the
handicap that most of us stagger under so early in the race. And because
of these things, to the keen old physician and student of life, the boy
was a revelation of that best part of himself--that best part of the
race. With the years this feeling of the Doctor's toward the boy has
grown even as their fellowship. But Dan has never understood; how indeed
could he?
It was always Dan who met the Doctor at the little wilderness station,
and who said the last good-bye when the visit was over. Always they were
together, roaming about the hills, on fishing trips to the river,
exploring the country for new delights, or revisiting their familiar
haunts. Dan seemed, in his quiet way, to claim his old friend by right
of discovery and the others laughingly yielded, giving the Doctor--as
Young Matt, the father, put it--"a third interest in the boy."
And so, with the companionship of the yearly visits, and frequent letters
in the intervening months, the Doctor watched the development of his
young friend, and dreamed of the part that Dan would play in life when he
became a man. And often as he watched the boy there was, on the face of
the old physician, that look of half envy, half regret.
In addition to his training at the little country school, Dan's mother
was his constant teacher, passing on to her son as only a mother could,
the truths she had received from her old master, the Shepherd. But when
the time came for more advanced intellectual training the choice of a
college was left to their friend. The Doctor hesitated. He shrank from
sending the lad out into the world. He foolishly could not bear the
thought of that splendid nature coming in touch with the filth of life as
he knew it. "You can see," he argued gruffly, "what it has done for me."
But Sammy answered, "Why, Doctor, what is the boy for?" And Young Matt,
looking away over Garber where an express train thundered over the
trestles and around the curves, said in his slow way, "The brush is about
all cleared, Doctor. The wilderness is going fast. The boy must live in
his own age and do his own work." When their friend urged that they
develop or sell the mine in the cave on Dewey Bald, and go with the boy,
they both shook their heads emphatically, saying, "No, Doctor, we belong
to the hills."
When the boy finally left his mountain home for a school in the distant
city, he had grown to be a man to fill the heart of every lover of his
race with pride. With his father's powerful frame and close-knit muscles,
and the healthy life of the woods and hills leaping in his veins, his
splendid body and physical strength were refined and dominated by the
mind and spirit of his mother. His shaggy, red-brown hair was like his
father's but his eyes were his mother's eyes, with that same trick of
expression, that wide questioning gaze, that seemed to demand every vital
truth in whatever came under his consideration. He had, too, his mother's
quick way of grasping your thoughts almost before you yourself were fully
conscious of them, with that same saving sense of humor that made Sammy
Lane the life and sunshine of the countryside.
"Big Dan," the people of the hills had come to call him and "Big Dan"
they called him in the school. For, in the young life of the schools, as
in the country, there is a spirit that names men with names that fit.
Secretly the Doctor had hoped that Dan would choose the profession so
dear to him. What an ideal physician he would make, with that clean,
powerful, well balanced nature; and above all with that love for his
race, and his passion to serve mankind that was the dominant note in his
character. The boy would be the kind of a physician that the old Doctor
had hoped to be. So he planned and dreamed for Dan as he had planned and
dreamed for himself, thinking to see the dreams that he had failed to
live, realized in the boy.
It was a severe shock to the Doctor when that letter came telling him of
Dan's choice of a profession. For the first time the boy had disappointed
him, disappointed him bitterly.
Seizing his fishing tackle the old man fled to the nearest stream. And
there gazing into the deep, still waters, where he had cast his hook, he
came to understand. It was that same dominant note in the boy's life,
that inborn passion to serve, that fixed principle in his character that
his life must be of the greatest possible worth to the world, that had
led him to make his choice. With that instinct born in him, coming from
the influence of the old Shepherd upon his father and mother, the boy
could no more escape it than he could change the color of his brown eyes.
"But," said the Doctor to his cork, that floated on the surface in a
patch of shadow, "what does he know about it, what does he really know?
He's been reading history--that's what's the matter with him. He sees
things as they were, not as they are. He should have come to me, I could
have--" Just then the cork went under. The Doctor had a bite. "I could
have told him," repeated the fisherman softly, "I--" The cork bobbed up
again--it was only a nibble. "He'll find out the truth of course. He's
that kind. But when he finds it!" The cork bobbed again--"He'll need me,
he'll need me bad!" The cork went under for good this time. Zip--and the
Doctor had a big one!
With fresh bait and his hook once more well down toward the bottom the
Doctor saw the whole thing clearly, and so planned a way by which, as he
put it, he might, when Dan needed him, "_stand by_."