THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE
_Secretum meum mihi_
FRANCIS OF ASSISI
BY
JAMES LANE ALLEN
AUTHOR OF "THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE," "THE CHOIR
INVISIBLE," "A SUMMER IN ARCADY," ETC.
=New York=
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1910
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1910,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
* * * * *
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1910.
=Norwood Press=
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO THE SOWER
PREFACE
THIS work now published under the title of "The Doctor's Christmas Eve"
is the one earlier announced for publication under the title of "A Brood
of the Eagle."
"The Doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor,
your closest friend now in middle life--do you ever tire of the
Doctor and wish him away?"
"The longer I know him, the more I like him, honor him, trust
him."
--_The Bride of the Mistletoe._
CONTENTS
PART FIRST
I
PAGE
THE CHILDREN OF DESIRE 1
II
WHEN A SON FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS FATHER 32
III
THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 69
IV
THE BOOK OF THE YEARS 107
V
EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE 195
PART SECOND
I
TWO OTHER WINTER SNOWBIRDS AT A WINDOW 213
II
FOUR IN A CAGE 233
III
THE REALM OF MIDNIGHT 258
IV
TIME-SPIRIT AND ETERNAL SPIRIT 271
V
WHEN A FATHER FINDS OUT ABOUT A SON 285
VI
LIVING OUT THE YEARS 297
PART I
THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE
I
THE CHILDREN OF DESIRE
THE morning of the twenty-fourth of December a quarter of a century ago
opened upon the vast plateau of central Kentucky as a brilliant but
bitter day--with a wind like the gales of March.
Out in a neighborhood of one of the wealthiest and most thickly settled
counties, toward the middle of the forenoon, two stumpy figures with
movements full of health and glee appeared on a hilltop of the treeless
landscape. They were the children of the neighborhood physician, a man
of the highest consequence in his part of the world; and they had come
from their home, a white and lemon-colored eighteenth-century manor
house a mile in their rear. Through the crystalline air the chimneys of
this low structure, rising out of a green girdle of cedar trees, could
be seen emptying unusual smoke which the wind in its gambolling pounced
upon and jerked away level with the chimney-tops.
But if you had stood on the hill where the two children climbed into
view and if your eye could have swept round the horizon with adequate
radius of vision, it would everywhere have been greeted by the same
wondrous harmonious spectacle: out of the chimneys of all dwellings
scattered in comfort and permanence over that rich domestic land--a land
of Anglo-Saxon American homes--more than daily winter smoke was pouring:
one spirit of preparation, one mood of good will, warmed houses and
hearts. The whole visible heaven was receiving the incense of Kentucky
Christmas fires; the whole visible earth was a panorama of the common
peace.
The two dauntless, frost-defying wayfarers--what Emerson, meeting them
in the depths of a New England winter, might have called two scraps of
valor--were following across fields and meadows and pastures one of the
footpaths which children who are friendly neighbors naturally make in
order to get to each other, as the young of wild creatures trace for
themselves upon the earth some new map of old hereditary traits and
cravings. For the goal of their journey they were hurrying toward a
house not yet in sight but hardly more than a mile ahead, where they
were to spend Christmas Day and share in an old people's and children's
Christmas-Tree party on Christmas Night--and where also they were to put
into execution a plot of their own: about which a good deal is to be
narrated.
They were thus transferring the nation's yearly festival of the home
from their own roof-tree to that of another family as the place where it
could be enacted and enjoyed. The tragical meaning of this arrangement
was but too well understood by their parents. To them the abandonment of
their own fireside at the season when its bonds should have been
freshened and deepened scarcely seemed an unnatural occurrence. The
other house had always been to them as a secondary home. It was the
residence of their father's friend, a professor in the State University
situated some miles off across fine country. His two surviving children,
a boy and a girl of about their own ages, had always been their intimate
associates. And the woman of that household--the wife, the mother--all
their lives they had been mysteriously impelled toward this gentlewoman
by a power of which they were unconscious but by which they had been
swayed.
The little girl wore a crimson hood and a brown cloak and the boy a
crimson skull cap and a brown overcoat; and both wore crimson mittens;
and both were red-legged and red-footed; for stockings had been drawn
over their boots to insure warmth and to provide safeguard against
slipping when they should cross the frozen Elkhorn or venture too
friskily on silvery pools in the valley bottoms.
The chestnut braids of the girl falling heavily from under her hood met
in a loop in the middle of her broad fat back and were tied there with a
snip of ribbon that looked like a feather out of the wing of a bluejay.
Her bulging hips overreached the borders of the narrow path, so that the
boy was crowded out upon the rough ground as he struggled forward close
beside her. She would not allow him to walk in front of her and he
disdained to walk behind.
"Then walk beside me or go back!" she had said to him, laughing
carelessly.
She looked so tight inside her wrappings, so like a jolly ambulatory
small barrel well hooped and mischievously daubed here and there with
vermilion, that you might have had misgivings as to the fate of the
barrel, were it to receive a violent jolt and be rolled over. No thought
of such mishap troubled her as she trotted forward, balancing herself as
lightly on her cushioned feet as though she were wind-carried
thistledown. Nor was she disturbed by her selfishness in monopolizing
the path and forcing her brother to encounter whatsoever the winter
earth obtruded--stumps of forest trees, brambles of blackberry, sprouts
of cane, or stalks of burdock and of Spanish needle. His footing was
especially troublesome when he tried to straddle wide corn-rows with his
short legs; or when they crossed a hemp-field where the butt-ends of the
stalks serried the frost-gray soil like bayonet points. Altogether his
exertions put him out of breath somewhat, for his companion was fleet
and she made no allowance for his delays and difficulties.
Her hands, deep in the fleece-lined mittens, were comfortably warm; but
she moreover kept them thrust into a muff of white fur, which also
looked overfed and seemed of a gay harmony with its owner. This muff she
now and then struck against her flexed knees in a vixenish playfulness
as one beats a tambourine on a bent elbow; and at a certain point of the
journey, having glanced sidewise at him and remarked his breath on the
icy air, she lifted it to her mouth and spoke guardedly from behind
it:--
"Remember the last thing Papa told us at the window, Herbert: we were to
keep our mouths closed and to breathe through our noses. And remember
also, my child, that we were to rely upon--_especially_ to rely
upon--the ribs and the diaphragm! I wonder why he thought it necessary
to tell us that! Did he suppose that as soon as we got by ourselves or
arrived at the Ousleys', we'd begin to rely upon something else, and
perhaps try to breathe with our spines and elbows?"
Her eyes sparkled with mischief, and her laughter had the audacity of a
child's satire, often more terrible in its small world than a sage's in
his larger one. The instant she spoke, you recognized the pertness and
precocity of an American child--which, when seen at its best or at its
worst, is without precedent or parallel among the world's children. She
was the image of a hard bold crisp newness. Her speech was new, her
ideas were new, her impertinence was new--except in this country. She
appeared to have gathered newness during her short life, to be newer
than the day she was born. The air was full of frost spangles that
zigzagged about her as she danced along; they rather seemed like
particles of salt especially provided to escort her character. If it had
been granted Lot's wife with tears of repentance to dissolve away the
crystals of her curiosity and resume the duties of motherhood,--though
possibly permeated by a mild saline solution as a warning,--that
salt-cured matron might admirably have adapted herself to the decrees of
Providence by producing Elsie.
The boy as she administered her caution stopped; and shutting his own
red mouth, which was like hers though more generous, he drew a long
breath through his nostrils; then, throwing back his head, he blew this
out with an open-mouthed puff, and a column of white steam shot up into
the blue ether and was whirled away by the wind. He stood studying it
awhile as it disappeared, for he was a close observer always--a
perpetual watcher of the thing that is--sometimes an observer fearful to
confront. Then he sprang forward to catch up with his sharp-tongued
monitress, who had hurried on. As he came alongside, he turned his face
toward her and made his reply, which was certainly deliberate enough in
arriving:--
"We have to be _taught_ the best way to breathe, Elsie; as anything
else!"
The defence only brought on a fresh attack:--
"I wonder who teaches the young of other animals how to breathe! I
should like to know who teaches kittens and puppies and calves and
lambs how to breathe! How _do_ they ever manage to get along without
country doctors among them! Imagine a middle-aged sheep--old Dr.
Buck--assembling a flock of lambs and trying to show them how to
breathe!" Judging from Elsie's expression, the lambs in the case could
not have thought very highly of this queer and genial Dr. Buck.
"But _they_ are all four-legged creatures, Elsie; and _they_ breathe
backward and forward; if you are a two-legged animal and stand up
straight, you breathe up and down: it's quite different! It's easier!"
"Then I suppose the fewer legs a thing has, the harder it is to get its
breath. And I suppose if we ventured to stand on _one_ leg, we'd all
soon suffocate! Dear me! why _don't_ all one-legged people die at once!"
The lad looked over the field of war on which it would seem that he was
being mowed down by small-gun fire before he could get his father's
heavy artillery into action. He decided to terminate the wordy
engagement, a prudential manoeuvre of the wiser head but slower tongue.
"Father is right," he declared. His manner of speaking was sturdy and
decisive: it was meant to remind her first that he had enough gallantry
as a male to permit her to crowd him out of the path; but that the
moment a struggle for mental footing arose between them, he reserved the
whole road: the female could take to the weeds! He notified her also
that he stood with his father not only in this puzzling question of legs
and parlous types of respiration, but that the men in the family were
regularly combined against the women--like good organized against evil!
But now something further had transpired. Had there been present on the
winter fields that morning an ear trained to separate our complex human
tones into simple ones--to disengage one from another the different
fibres of meaning which always make up even the slenderest tendril of
sound (as there is a cluster of grapes to a solitary stem), it might, as
it noted one thing, have discovered another. While the boy asserted his
father to be right in the matter they were debating, there escaped from
him an accent of admission that his father was wrong--wrong in some far
graver affair which was his discovery and his present trouble.
Therefore his voice, which should have been buoyant, for the instant was
depressed; and his face, which should have been a healthy boy's happy
face, was overcast as by a foreign interference. You might have likened
it to a small luminary upon the shining disk of which a larger body,
traversing its darkened orbit, has just begun to project a wavering
shadow. And thus some patient astronomer of our inter-orbited lives,
sweeping the spiritual heavens for signs of its pendent mysteries, here
might have arrested his telescope to watch the portent of a celestial
event: was there to take place the eclipse of a son by a father?
Certainly at least this weight of responsibility on the voice must have
caused it to strike only the more winningly upon any hearer. It was such
a devoted, loyal voice when he thus spoke of his father, with a curious
quavering huskiness of its own, as though the bass note of his distant
manhood were already beginning to clamor to be heard.
The voice of the little girl contrariwise was a shrill treble. Had you
first become aware of it at your back, you must instantly have wheeled
to investigate the small creature it came from, as a wild animal quickly
turns to face any sound that startles its instincts. Voltaire might have
had such a voice if he had been a little girl. Yet to look at her, you
would never have imagined that anything but the honey of speech could
have dripped from so perfect a little rose. (Many surprises await
mankind behind round amiable female faces: shrews are not _all_ thin.)
Instead of being silenced by her brother's ultimatum, she did not deign
to notice it, but continued to direct her voluble satire at her
father--quite with the air of saying that a girl who can satirize a
parent is not to be silenced by a son.
"... forever telling us that American children must have the newest and
best way of doing everything.... My, my, my! The working of our jaws!
And the drinking and the breathing; and the stretching and the bending:
developing everything we have--and everything we haven't! I am even
trying now to find an original American way to go to sleep at night and
to wake up in the morning! Dear me, but old people can be silly without
knowing it!" She laughed with much self-approval.
For Elsie had already entered into one of mankind's most dependable
recreations--the joy of listening to our own words: into that economic
arrangement of nature whereby whatsoever a human being might lose
through the vocal cords is returned to the owner along the auditory
nerve! So that a woman can eat her colloquial cake times over: and each
time, having devoured it, can return it to the storeroom and have it
brought out as whole and fresh as ever--sometimes actually increased in
size. And a man can send his vocal Niagara through his whirlpool rapids
and catch it again above the falls! The more gold the delver unearths,
the more he can empty back into the thinking mine. One can sit in his
own cranial theatre and produce his own play: he can be stage and
orchestra, audience and critic; and he can see that the claque does not
get drowsy and slack: it never does--in _this_ case!
The child now threw back her round winter-rose of a face and started
along the path with a fresh outburst of speed and pride. Access of
impertinence seemed to have released in her access of vitality. Perhaps
it had. Perhaps it always does. Perhaps life itself at the full is sheer
audacity.
The lad scrambled roughly along, and merely repeated the words that
sufficed for him:--
"Father knows."
Suddenly he gave a laughing outcry, and stood still.
"Look!" he called out, with amusement at his plight.
He had run into some burdock, and the nettles had stuck to his yarn
stockings like stinging bees--a cluster of them about his knees and
calves. He drew off his gloves, showing the strong, overgrown hands of
boyhood: they, like his voice, seemed impatiently reaching out for
maturity.
When he overtook his companion, who had not stopped, he had transferred
a few of the burrs to his skull cap. He had done this with crude
artistry--from some faint surviving impulse of primitive man to decorate
his body with things around him in nature: especially his head (possibly
he foresaw that his head would be most struck at). The lad was pleased
with his caper; and, smiling, thrust his head across her path, expecting
her to take sympathetic notice. He had reason to expect this, because on
dull rainy days at home he often amused her with the things he did and
the things he made: for he was a natural carpenter and toy-maker. But
now she took only the contemptuous notice of disapproval. This morning
her mind was intent on playthings of positive value: she was a little
travelling ten-toed pagoda of holiday greed. Every Christmas she
prepared for its celebration with a balancing eye to what it would cost
her and what it would bring in: she always calculated to receive more
than she gave: for Elsie, the Nativity must be made _to pay_!
He resented her refusal to approve his playfulness by so much as a
smile, and he came back at her by doing worse:--
"Why didn't I think to bring all the burrs along and make a Christmas
basket for Elizabeth? Now what will I give her?"
This drew out a caustic comment quickly enough:--
"Poor Elizabeth!"
A child resents injustice with a blow or rage or tears: the old have
learned to endure without a sign--waiting for God's day of judgment (or
their first good opportunity!).
He was furious at the way she said "Poor Elizabeth"--as though
Elizabeth's hands would be empty of gifts from him.
"You _know_ I have _bought_ my presents for Elizabeth, Elsie!" he
exclaimed. "But Elizabeth thinks more of what I _make_ than of what I
_buy_," he continued hotly. "And the less it is worth, the more she
values it. But you can't understand _that_, Elsie! And you needn't try!"
The little minx laughed with triumph that she had incensed him.
"I don't expect to try!" she retorted blithely. "I don't see that I'd
gain anything, if I _did_ understand. You and Elizabeth are a great deal
too--"
He interrupted overbearingly:--
"Leave Elizabeth out! Confine your remarks to me!"
"My remarks will be wholly unconfined," said Elsie, as she trotted
forward.
He scrambled alongside in silent rage. Perhaps he was thinking of his
inability to reach protected female license. He may obscurely have felt
that life's department of justice was being balked at the moment by its
department of natural history--a not uncommon interference in this too
crowded world. At least he put himself on record about it:--
"If you were a boy, Elsie, you'd get taken down a buttonhole!"
"Don't you worry about my buttonholes!" chirped Elsie. "My buttonholes
are where they ought to be!"
It was not the first time that he had made something of this sort for
Elizabeth. One morning of the May preceding he had pulled apart the
boughs of a blooming lilac bush in the yard, and had seen a nest with
four pale-green eggs. That autumn during a ramble in the woods and
fields he had taken burrs and made a nest and deposited in it four
pale-green half-ripe horse chestnuts.
Elizabeth, who did not amount to much in this world but breath and a
soft cloud of hair and sentiment, had loyally carried it off to her
cabinet of nests. These were duly arranged on shelves, and labelled
according to species and life and love: "The Meadow Lark's"--"The
Blue-bird's"--"The Orchard Oriole's"--"The Brown Thrasher's"; on and on
along the shelves. At the end of a row she placed this treasured
curiosity, and inscribed it, "An Imitation by a Young Animal."
Elizabeth's humor was a mild beam.
Do country children in that part of the world make such playthings now?
Do they still look to wild life and not wholly to the shops of cities
for the satisfying of their instincts for toys and games and fancies?
Do alder stalks still race down dusty country lanes as thoroughbred
colts, afterwards to be tied in their stalls in fence corners with
halters of green hemp? Does any little rustic instrument-maker now
draw melodies from a homegrown corn-stalk? Across rattling
window-panes of old farm-houses--between withered sashes--during long
winter nights does there sound the æolian harp made with a hair from a
horse-tail? Do boys still squeeze the red juice of poke-berries on the
plumage of white barnyard roosters, thus whenever they wish bringing
on a cock-fight between old far-squandered Cochins, who long
previously had entered into a treaty as to their spheres of influence
in a Manchuria of hens? Do the older boys some wet night lead the
youngest around the corner of the house in the darkness and show him,
there! rising out of the ground! the long expected Devil come at last
(as a pumpkin carved and candle-lighted) for his own particular urchin?
When in autumn the great annual ceremony of the slaughter of the swine
takes place on the farms at the approach of the winter solstice,--a
festival running back to aboriginal German tribes before the beginnings
of agriculture, when the stock that had been fattened on the mast and
pasturage of the mountains was driven down into the villages and
perforce killed to keep it from starving,--when this carnival of flesh
recurs on Kentucky farms, do boys with turkey-quills or goose-quills
blow the bladders up, tie the necks and hang them in smoke-houses or
garrets to dry; and then at daybreak of Christmas morning, having warmed
and expanded them before the fire, do they jump on them and explode
them--a primitive folk-rite for making a magnificent noise ages older
than the use of crackers and cannon?
Do children contrive their picture-frames by glueing October acorns and
pine-cones to ovals of boards and giving the mass a thick coat of
varnish? On winter nights do little girls count the seeds of the apples
they are eating and pronounce over them the incantation of their
destinies--thus in another guise going through the same charm of words
that Marguerite used as she scattered earthward the petals of trust and
ruin? Do they, sitting face to face bareheaded on sun-hued meadows,
pluck the dandelion when its seed are clustered at the top like a ball
of gauze, and with one breath try to blow these off: for the number of
seed that remain will tell the too many years before they shall be asked
in marriage? Do they slit the stems and cast them into the near brook
and watch them form into ringlets and floating hair--as of a water
spirit? Do they hold buttercups under each other's chins to see who
likes butter--that is, mind you, _good_ butter! Romping little Juliets
of Nature's proud courtyards--with young Montagues watching from afar!
Sane little Ophelias of the garland at the water's brink--secure for
many years yet from all sad Hamlets! Do country children do such things
and have such notions now?
Perhaps once in a lifetime, on some summer day when the sky was filled
with effulgence and white clouds, you may have seen a large low-flying
bird cross the landscape straight away from you, so exactly poised under
the edge of a cloud, that one of the wings beat in shadow while the
other waved in light. Thus these two children, following their path over
the fields that morning, ran along the dividing-line between the
darkness and the light of their world.
On one side of them lay the thinning shadow of man's ancient romance
with Nature which is everywhere most rapidly dying out in this
civilization--the shadow of that romance which for ages was the earliest
ray of his religion: in later centuries became the splendor of his art;
then loomed as the historic background of his titanic myths and fables;
and now only in obscure valleys is found lingering in the play of
superstitious children at twilights before darkness engulfs them--the
latest of the infants in the dusk of the oldest gods.
On the other side blazed the hard clear light of that realism of human
life which is the unfolding brightness of the New World; that light of
reason and of reasonableness which seems to take from man both his
mornings and his evenings, with all their half-lights and their
mysteries; and to leave him only a perpetual noonday of the actual in
which everything loses its shadow. So the two ran that morning. But so
children ever run--between the fresh light and the old darkness of
ever-advancing humanity--between the world's new birth and a forgetting.
* * * * *
On the brother and sister skipped and bounded, wild with health and
Christmas joy. Their quarrel was in a moment forgotten--happy children!
The nature of the little girl was not deep enough to remember a quarrel;
the boy's nature was too deep to remember one. Crimson-tipped, madcap,
winter spirits! The blue dome vaulting infinitely above them with all
its clouds pushed aside; the wind throwing itself upon them at every
step like some huge young animal force unchained for exercise and rude
in its good-natured play. As they crossed a woodland pasture the hoary
trees rocked and roared, strewing in their path bits of bark and rotten
twigs and shattered sprigs of mistletoe. In an open meadow a
yellow-breasted lark sprang reluctantly from its cuddling-place and
drifted far behind them on the rushing air. In a corn-field out of a
dried bunch of partridge grass a rabbit started softly and went bobbing
away over the corn-rows--with its white flag run up at the rear end of
the fortifications as a notice "Please not to shoot or otherwise
trespass!" Alas, that so palpable and polite a request should be treated
as so plain a target!
Once the little girl changed her trotting gait to a walk nearly as fast,
so that her skirts swished from side to side of her plump hips with
wren-like energy and briskness. Her mind was still harping on her
father; and having satirized him, and adoring him, she now would fain
approve him.
"My! but it's cold, Herbert! Papa says it is not sickness that plays
havoc with you: it's not being ready for sickness; and being ready
depends upon how you have lived: it depends upon what you are; and
that's where your virtue comes in, my child, if you have any virtue. We
have been taught to stay out of doors when it is cold; and now we can
come out when it is colder. We were ready for the crisis!" and Elsie
pushed her nose into the air with smallish amusement.
The boy gravely pondered her words about crisis, and pondered his own
before replying:--
"I wonder what kind of children we'd have been if we'd had some other
father. Or some other _mother_," he added with a change of tone as he
uttered that last word; and he looked askance at his sister to see
whether she would glance at him.
She kept her face set straight forward; but she impatiently exclaimed:--
"Others, others, others! You are always thinking of _others_, Herbert!"
"I am one of them myself! I am one of the others myself!" cried the boy,
relieved that his secret was his own; and bounding suddenly on the earth
also as if with a sense of his kinship to its unseen host.
The question he had asked marked him: for he was one of the children who
from the outset begin to ask of life what it means and who are surprised
when there is no one to tell them. For him there was no rest until he
solved some mystery or had at least found out where some mystery stood
abandoned on the road--a mystery still. Her intelligence stopped short
at what she perfectly knew. She saw with amazing clearness, but she
beheld very little. Hers was that order of intelligence which is gifted
with vision of almost terrifying accuracy--at short range: life is a
thin painted curtain, and its depths are the painted curtain's depths.
Once they came to a pair of bars which led into a meadow. The bars were
of green timber and were very heavy. As he strained and tugged at them,
she waited close behind him, dancing to the right and to the left so
that there was a sound of mud-crystals being crushed under her
tyrannical little fat feet.
"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" she exclaimed with impatience. "We may run in the
cold, but we must not stand still in the cold;" and she kicked him on
the heels and pummelled him between the shoulders with her muff.
"I am doing my best," he said, laughing heartily.
"Your best is not good enough," she urged, laughing heartily likewise.
"This bar is wedged tight. It's the sap that's frozen to the post. Look
out there behind!"
He stepped back, and, with a short run, lifted his leg and kicked the
bar with his full strength. The recoil threw him backward to the ground,
but he was quickly on his feet again; and as the bar was now loosened,
he let it down for her. She stepped serenely through and without looking
back or waiting trotted on. He put the bars up and with a spurt soon
overtook her, for the meadow they were now crossing had been closely
grazed in the autumn and there was better walking. They went up rising
ground and reached one of those dome-like elevations which are a feature
of the blue-grass country.
Straight ahead of them half a mile away stood the house toward which
they were hastening; a two-story brick house, lifted a little above its
surroundings of yard and gardens and shrubbery and vines: an oak-tree
over its roof, cedar-trees near its windows, ivy covering one of its
walls, a lawn sloping from it to a thicket of evergreens where its
Christmas Tree each year was cut.
The children greeted with fresh enthusiasm the sight of this charming,
this ideal place to which they were transferring their Christmas plans
and pleasures--abandoning their own hearthstone. There lived their
father's friend; there lived Harold and Elizabeth, their friends; and
there lived the wife and mother of the household--the woman toward whom
from their infancy they had been herded as by a driving hand.
The tell-tale Christmas smoke of the land was pouring from its chimneys,
showing that it was being warmed through and through for coming guests
and coming festivities. At one end of the building, in an ell, was the
kitchen; it sent forth a volume of smoke, the hospitable invitations of
which there was no misunderstanding. At the opposite end was the parlor:
it stood for the Spirit, as the kitchen for the honest Flesh: the wee
travellers on the distant hilltop thought of the flesh first.
They had no idea of the origin of the American Christmas. They did not
know that this vast rolling festival has migrated to the New World,
drawing with it things gathered from many lands and centuries; that the
cooking and the feasting crossed from pagan England; that the evergreen
with its lights and gifts came from pagan Germany; that the mystical
fireside with its stockings was introduced from Holland; that the
evergreen now awaiting them in the shut and darkened parlor of this
Kentucky farm-house represented the sacred Tree which has been found in
nearly every ancient land and is older than the Tree of Life in the
literature of Eden.
As far as they thought of the antiquity of the Christmas festival at
all, it had descended straight from the Holy Land and the Manger of
Bethlehem; this error now led to complications.
The boy's crimson skull-cap had a peak which curled forward; and
attached to this peak by several inches of crewel hung a round crimson
ball about the size of the seed-ball of a sycamore. The shifting wind
blew it hither and thither so that it buffeted him in the face and eyes.
On this exposed height, especially, the wind raced free; and he ducked
his head and turned his face sidewise toward her--an imp of winter
joy--as he shouted across the gale:--
"If people are still baking such quantities of cake in memory of
Christmas after all these hundreds of years, don't you suppose, Elsie,
that the Apostles must have been fearful cake-eaters? To have left such
an impression on the world! Cake _is_ a kind of sacred thing at home
even yet, isn't it? A fine cake looks still as if it was baked for an
Apostle! Doesn't it? Now doesn't it?"
Elsie did not reply at once. Her younger brother was growing into the
habit of saying unexpected things. Once after he had left the breakfast
table, she had heard her father say to her mother that he had genius.
Elsie was not positive as to all that genius comprised; but she at once
decided that if she did not possess genius she did not wish genius.
However she packed herself off to her room and thought further about
this unpleasant parental discrimination.
"If he has genius," she said finally, "at least he did not get it from
_them_," and there was a triumph in her eye. "I see not the slightest
sign of genius in either of _them:_ he must have gotten it from our
grandparents--never from _them_!"
From that moment she had begun to oppose her mind to his mind as a
superior working instrument in a practical world. Whenever he put forth
a fancy, she put forth a fact; and the fact was meant to extinguish the
fancy as a muffler puts out a candle. After a moment she now
replied--with a mind that had repudiated genius:--
"Nothing is said in the New Testament, my child, about cake. The only
thing mentioned is loaves and fishes. But they _do_ seem to have done an
unconscionable amount of dining on bread and fish!" and Elsie had her
own satirical laugh at the table customs of ancient Palestine as viewed
from the Kentucky standard of the nineteenth century.
The boy before replying deliberated as always.
"They may not have had cake, but they had meat: because they said he sat
with sinners at meat. I wonder why it was always _the sinners_ who got
_the meat_!"
Elsie could offer no personal objection to this: Providence had ordained
her to dwell in the tents of flesh herself.
"How could they feed five thousand people on five loaves and two fishes?
How _could_ they? At one of those fish dinners!"
"They did it!" said Elsie flatly. She saw the whole transaction with
brilliant clearness--saw to the depths of the painted curtain. It was as
naturally fact as the family four of them at breakfast that morning, fed
on home-smoked sausages and perfectly digestible buckwheat cakes.
"And twelve baskets of crumbs! That makes it worse! With bread for
thousands everywhere, why pick up crumbs?"
"Nothing is said about crumbs; they were fragments."
"But if I've got to believe it, I've got to think how they did it! I've
_got_ to! If I can't think of it as it is, I must think of it as it
isn't! But I can't do anything with the loaves; I give up the bread.
However, I think those two fish might have been leviathans. That would
be only two thousand five hundred people to each leviathan. Many of them
might not have liked leviathan. I wouldn't have wanted any! They could
have skipped me! They could have had my slice! And the babies--they
didn't want _much_! Anyhow, that's the best I can do for the fish"; and
he had his laugh also--not an incessant ripple like hers, but a music
issuing from the depths of him through joy in the things he saw.
Elsie made the reply which of late was becoming habitual in her talks
with him.
"Don't begin to be _peculiar_, Herbert. You are too young to be
_peculiar_. Leave that to old people!" and Elsie's mind glided off from
the loaves and the fishes of Galilee to certain old people of her
neighborhood from whose eccentricities she extracted acrid amusement.
The boy's words were not irreverent; irreverence had never been taught
him; he did not know what irreverence was. They merely expressed the
primary action of his mind in dealing with what to him was a
wonder-story of Nature. And yet with this same mind which asked of
wonder that it be reasonable, he was on his way to the celebration of
Christmas Eve and to the story of the Nativity--the most joyous, the
most sad, the most sublime Nature-story of mankind.
His unconscious requirement was that this also must be reasonable; if it
were not, he would accept the portions that were reasonable and reject
the others as now too childish for his fore-handed American brain.
They were nearing the end of their bitter walk. The little girl as she
hurried forward now and then strained her eyes toward the opposite ends
of the house ahead; at the kitchen smoke which promised such gifts to
the flesh; at the window-shutters of the darkened parlor where the
Christmas Tree stood, soon to be decorated with presents: some for
her--the little fat mercenary now approaching who was positive that
during these days of preparation she had struck a shrewd bargain with
the Immortal.
The boy, too, looked at these windows; but especially he looked at
another between them, from which perhaps Elizabeth was watching for him.
Once he turned, and, walking backward, directed his gaze from this high
point far across the country. Somewhere back there his father might now
be stopping at a farm-house. A malignant disease was raging among the
children of the neighborhood, some of whom were his schoolmates and
friends; the holidays would bring no merry Christmas for them.
Wherever his father might be, there an influence started and came
rushing across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud. It fell upon
him, and travelled on toward the house he was approaching; it
disappeared within the house and fell upon the woman who so wonderfully
moved about in it: a chilling mysterious shadow that bound the three of
them--his father and himself and this gentle woman--together in a band
of darkness.
Then he faced about and ran on, longing the more ardently for Elizabeth:
the path between him and Elizabeth lay before his nimble feet like a
band of light.
II
WHEN A BOY FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS FATHER
ON the day preceding that twenty-fourth of December when his two
weather-proof untrammelled children were rioting over the frozen earth,
Dr. Birney met with an event which may here be set down as casting the
first direct light upon him. Some reflected radiance may already have
gone glancing in his direction from the luminous prattle of his
offspring; some obscure glimpses must therein have bodied him forth: and
the portraits that children unconsciously paint of people--what trained
hand ever drew such living lines?
A short stretch across the country from his comfortable manor house
there towered in stateliness one of the finest homesteads of this
region; and in the great bedroom of this house, in the mother's bed,
there had lain for days one of his patients critically ill, the only
child of an intense mother who was herself no longer young.
Early that morning upon setting out he had driven rapidly to this house,
gotten quickly out, and been quickly received through the front door
thrown open to admit him. After examining the child, he had turned to
the mother and spoken the words that are probably the happiest ever to
fall from any tongue upon any ear:--
"He is out of danger. He is getting well."
At this intelligence the mother forgot the presence of another mother
older than herself who had come to be with her during these vigils and
anxieties. As the doctor, having spoken a few words to the nurse, passed
out into the hall toward the hat-rack, she led him into the parlors; she
pulled him down into a chair beside the one she took; she caught his
hand in hers and drew it into her lap. She forgot that after all she was
a woman and he was a man; she remembered only that she was a mother and
he a physician; and unnerved by the relief from days and nights of
tension, she poured out her quivering gratitude.
The doctor with a warm light in his eyes listened; and he was flushed
with pleasure also at his skill in bringing his case through; but she
had scarcely begun before his expression showed embarrassment. Gratitude
rendered him ill at ease: who can thank Science? Who can thank a man for
doing his duty and his best? With a smile of deprecation he
interrupted:--
"A great surgeon of France centuries ago was accustomed to say of a
convalescent patient: 'God cured him; I dressed him.' I do not know
whether, if I dared speak for the science of medicine near the close of
the nineteenth century, I could say that. That is not the language of
science now. If science thanks anything, it thanks other sciences and
respects itself. But I will say that I might not have been able to save
the life of your son if he had not been a healthy child--and a happy
one; for happiness in a child is of course one of its signs of health.
In his case I did not have to treat a patient with a disease; I had
merely to treat a disease in a patient: and there is a great difference.
The patient kept out of the case altogether, or in so far as he entered
it, he entered it as my assistant. But if he had not been healthy and
happy, the result might have been--well, different."
The mother's face became more radiant.
"If his health and happiness helped him through," she exclaimed, "then
his mother enters into the case; for his health was his birthright from
his parents; and his happiness--on account of the absence of his father
during most of his life when he has been awake--has been a gift from his
mother. He has lived with Happiness; Happiness has been before his eyes;
Happiness has filled his ears; Happiness has held him in its arms;
Happiness has danced for his feet; Happiness has rocked him to sleep;
Happiness has smiled over him when he awoke. He has not known anything
but Happiness because Happiness has been his mother. And so, if he owes
the preservation of his life to Happiness, he owes it to the instinct of
maternal imitation."
The doctor had heard this carolling of maternity with full
approval--this heaven-rising skylark song of motherhood; but at the last
sentence he pricked up his ears with disfavor and stopped smiling: with
him these were marks that he had withdrawn his intellectual fellowship.
The trouble was that he esteemed her a charming and irreproachable woman
and wife and mother; but that he could accord her no rank as a
scientist, no standing whatsoever; and therefore he must part company
with her when she spoke for instincts. The instinct of maternal
imitation--the vanity of it! That her sex could believe a child to be
sent into this world by the great Mother of all wisdom and given so poor
a start as to be placed under the tyranny of an instinct to imitate any
other imperfect human being--man or woman.
Perhaps it was one of his weaknesses, when he came upon a case of folly,
to wish to perform an operation in mental surgery at once--and without
anæsthetics, in order that the wide-awake intelligence of the sufferer
might be enlisted against the recurrence of such a necessity.
In a tone of affectionate forbearance he now said:--
"If only there were any such thing in Nature as the instinct of maternal
imitation! Children have enough instincts to battle with and fight their
way through, as it is. Let me beg of you not to teach your child
anything as criminally wrong as that; and don't you be so criminally
wrong as to believe it!"
The mother's countenance fell. She released the doctor's hand and pushed
her chair back; and she brushed out her lap with both hands as though
his words might somehow have fallen into it, and she did not wish them
to remain there. She spoke caustically:--
"No intimate sacred bond between mother and child which guides it to
imitate her?"
She felt as though he had attacked the very citadel of motherhood; as
though he had overthrown the tested and adopted standards of universal
thinking, the very basic idea of existence; and she recoiled from this
as a taint of eccentricity in him--that early death-knell of a
physician's usefulness.
But the doctor swept her words away with gay warmth:--
"Oh, there is the intimate sacred bond, of course! No doubt the most
intimate, the most sacred in this world. Believe in that all you can:
the more the better! But we are not speaking of that: that has nothing
to do with this imagined instinct of maternal imitation. Don't you know
that a foundling in a foundling asylum as instinctively imitates its
nurse? Don't you know that a child as instinctively imitates its
stepmother--if it loves her? Don't you know that a child as
instinctively imitates its grandmother?"
The mother lay back in her chair and looked at him without a word. But
then, Doctor Birney could be rude, curt, brutal. In proof of which he
now leaned over toward her and continued with more gentleness:--
"Do you not know that every child in this world begins its advance into
life by one path only--the path of least resistance? and its path of
least resistance is paved and lined with what it likes! As soon as it
can do anything for itself, it tries to do what it likes, and it never
tries to do anything else. When, later on, a time comes when it can be
persuaded to do a thing that it has already desired _not_ to do, then
its will comes into the case; it ceases to be simply a little animal and
becomes a little human animal; it begins to be moral and heroic instead
of unmoral and unheroic. But we are not talking about that. The best we
can do is to call those earliest movements of its life the reaching out
of its instincts and its taking hold of things that are like its own
leading traits. The parallel is in Nature where the tendril of a vine
takes hold of the matured branch of the same vine and pulls itself up by
this. Thus one generation knits itself to another through the binding of
like to like; and that is the whole bond between mother and child or
father and child: it is like attaching itself to like under the
influence of love. In this world every subject has two doors: you open
one, and the good things come out. You open the other, and the evil
things come out. This subject has its two doors: and I open first the
door of Mother of Pearl--for you two pearls of mothers! Out of it come
all the exquisite radiant traits that bind mothers and children. How
many great men in history have begun their growth by attaching
themselves to the great traits of their mothers? Then there is the other
door. I am sorry to open it, but whether I open it or not, opened it
will be: the Door of Ebony behind which are imprisoned all the dark
things that bind parents and children. I am afraid I shall have to
illustrate: if a child is born mendacious and its mother has mendacity
as one of her leading traits, its little mendacity will flourish on her
large mendacity. If it is born deceitful, and hypocrisy is one of her
traits, hypocrisy in it will pull itself up by taking hold of hypocrisy
in her. If it is born quick-tempered, and if ungovernable temper is one
of her failings, every exhibition of this in her will foster its
impatience and lack of self-control. These are some few of the dreadful
things that come out: and if it is dreadful even to speak of them, think
how much more dreadful to see them alive and to set them at work! Now
let's shut the dark Door! And let us hope that some day Nature herself
may not be able to open it ever again!"
Hitherto the older of the two mothers, the mother of many children, had
remained silent with that peculiar expression of patience and sweetness
which lies like a halo on the faces of good women who have brought many
children into the world. She now spoke as if to release many thoughts
weighing heavily upon her.
"It has always been my trouble--not that my children would not imitate
me, but that they _would_ imitate me! I have my faults, for I am human;
and I can endure them as long as they remain mine. They have ceased to
give me much concern. I suppose in a way I have grown attached to them,
just as I like people whom I do not entirely approve. But as soon as I
see the children reproducing my faults, these become responsibilities.
They keep me awake at night; sometimes they distress me almost beyond
endurance. I know I have spent many anxious years with this problem. And
I know also that the only times when their father has been overanxious
about his failings has been when the boys have imitated _him_. He is
always ready to lead a splendid attack on his faults, and they march at
him from the direction of the boys!"
"And so," said the doctor, laughing, "this instinct of parental
imitation is an instrument safe to take by the handle, and dangerous to
grasp by the blade!"
He knew fathers in the neighborhood who were dreading the time when
their sons might begin to imitate them--too far. And other fathers
dreading the hour when their sons might cease to imitate their sires,
and wander away preferably to imitate persons outside the family
connection,--possibly an instinct of non-parental imitation!
He rose to go in a mood of great good nature, and looked from one to the
other of the two mothers:--
"Perhaps Nature protected children from the danger of imitating by not
making it their duty to imitate. And perhaps, as all parents are
imperfect human beings, she may have thought it simple justice to
children to confer upon them the right to be disobedient. At least, if
there is an instinct to obey, it is backed up with an equal instinct not
to obey; and the two seem to have been left to fight it out between
themselves; and that perhaps is the great battle-field where incessant
fighting goes on between parents and children. And at least disobedience
has been of equal value with obedience in the making of human history,
in the development of the race. For if children had simply obeyed their
parents, if the young had been born merely to ape the old, there never
would have been any human young and old. We should all still be apes,
even if we had developed as far as that. You two ladies--of course with
greatly modified features--might be throwing cocoanuts at each other on
the tops of two rival palm-trees. Or--as the dutiful daughters of
dutiful mothers--you might be taking afternoon naps in an oasis of
dates--all because of that instinct of maternal imitation!"
He hurried out to the hat-rack, making his retreat at the top of his own
high spirits, they following; and with one glove on he held out his hand
to the mother of the sick boy:--
"I'll come in the morning to see how he is--and to see how his mother
is. Now shake hands and say I have been a good doctor to you both."
The mother's reply showed that bitterness rankled in her, as she yielded
her hand coldly:--
"Even if you have tried to destroy for me the intimate sacred bond
between a mother and her child, I don't think you will be able to deny
that my boy is a healthy and happy child because he is a child of a
perfect marriage!" And she looked with secret and shaded import at the
other mother.
As the doctor drove out of the yard her last words lingered--_the
healthy children of a perfect marriage_. And the look the two mothers
had exchanged! It was as though each had a sword in her eye and touched
him with the point of it--hinting that he merited being run through. How
often during these years he had encountered that same look from other
mothers of the neighborhood!
"But if a wound like that could have been fatal," he reflected, "if a
wound like that could have finished me, I should not have been here to
save the life of her boy; he would have been dead this morning."
Then his mind under the rigor of long training passed to happier
subjects. His success in the case of this child was one more triumph in
his long list; it renewed his grip on power within him.
* * * * *
But for the necessity to provide for a people the services of general
practitioner, Dr. Birney would have made a specialty of children's
diseases. The happiest moment he experienced in his profession was a day
such as this when he could announce the triumph of his skill and the
saving of a young life. There was no sadder one than any day on which he
walked out of the sick chamber and at the threshold met the gaunt
ancient Presence, waiting to stalk in and take the final charge of the
case given up by the vanquished physician. And when a few days later he
sat in his buggy on the turnpike at the end of a procession--his healthy
little patient stretched prostrate at the other end--he driving there as
the public representative of a science that was ages old and that had
gathered from all lands the wisdom of the best minds but was still
impotent--on such a day he went down to his lowest defeat.
He had such faith in the future of his science that he looked forward to
the time when there would be no such monstrous tragedy on this planet as
infant mortality. No healthy child would ever be allowed to die of
disease; disease would never be permitted to reach it, or reaching it,
would be arrested as it arrived. The vast multitude of physicians and
surgeons now camped around the morning of life, waiting to receive the
incoming generations on the rosy mountain-tops of its dawn--nearly all
these would be withdrawn; they would move across the landscape of the
world and pitch their tents on the plains of waning daylight; there to
receive the ragged and broken army that came staggering from the
battle-field, every soldier more or less wounded, every soldier more or
less weary; there to give them a twilight of least suffering, their
sundown of peace; and there to arrange that the great dark Gates closed
on them softly.
The conversation that morning disclosed among other facts the secret
dread of Dr. Birney's life: that the time would come when his children,
especially his boy, might begin to imitate him more than he desired. For
a long time now he had kept under closest observation the working out in
each of them of the law of like attaching itself to like; for already
this had borne fruit for both on the vine of his own profession.
A physician in a city may practise his profession with complete
segregation from the members of his family; his office may be miles
away; if he sees his patients in his house, his children are kept in
another part of it. But out in the country the whole house is open; the
children rove everywhere; if their father is a physician, they know when
he starts and when he returns; and there is displayed in full view the
entire drama of his life. And this life is twofold: for the physician
must demonstrate as no member of any other profession is required to
do--that whoever would best serve mankind must first best serve himself.
In this service he must reach a solution of the selfish and the
unselfish; he must reconcile the world's two warring philosophies of
egoism and altruism. The outside world has its attention fixed solely
upon the drama of the physician's public service to it; for the members
of his own family is reserved acquaintance with the drama of his
devotion to himself. Well for him and well for them if they do not
misunderstand!
Each of Dr. Birney's children responded to the attraction of a phase of
his life--the phase that appealed to a leading trait in each.
From the time of the little girl's beginning to observe her father she
was influenced by what looked to her like his self-love: his care about
what he ate and drank; his changing of his clothes whenever he came
home, whether they were drenched or were dry; his constant washing of
his hands; all this pageant of self-adulation mirrored itself in her
consciousness. When he was away from home, she could still follow him by
her mother's solicitude for his comfort and safety. To Elsie's mother
the ill were not so much a source of anxiety as a husband who was
perfectly well; and thus there had been built up in Elsie herself the
domineering idea that her father was the all-important personage in the
neighborhood as a consequence of thinking chiefly of himself.
Selfishness in her reached out and twined itself like a tendril about
selfishness in him; and she proceeded to lift herself up and grow by
this vital bond.
Too young to transmit this resemblance, she did what she could to pass
it on to the next generation: she handed it down and disseminated it in
her doll-house. There was something terrifying and grim and awful in the
fatalistic accuracy with which Elsie reproduced her father's selfishness
among her dolls, because it was on a mimic scale what is going on all
over the world: the weaving by children's fingers of parental designs
long perpetuated in the tapestry of Nature; the same old looms, the same
old threads, the same old designs--but new fingers.
One of the dolls was known as "the doctor"; the others were the members
of his family and his domestics. This puppet was a perfect child-image
of the god of self-idolatry, as set up in the person of a certain Dr.
Downs Birney, and as observed by his very loyal and most affectionate
and highly amused daughter Elsie.
One day the doctor, quietly passing the opened door of the nursery, saw
Elsie on the floor with her back turned to him faithfully copying and
dramatizing some of the daily scenes of his professional life. His eyes
shone with humor as he looked on; but there was sadness in them as he
turned silently away.
With the boy it was otherwise. The earliest notion of his father the boy
had grasped was that of always travelling toward the sick--to a world
that needed him. All the roads of the neighborhood--turnpikes, lanes,
carriage-tracks, wagon-tracks, foot-paths--met at his father's house; if
you followed any one of them long enough, sooner or later you would
reach some one who was sick.
When he was quite young his father began to take him in his buggy on his
circuits; and at every house where they stopped, he witnessed this
never-ending drama of need and aid. Such countenances people had as they
followed his father out to the buggy where he was holding the reins!
Such happy faces--or so sad, so sad! Souls hanging on his father's word
as though life went on with it or went to pieces with it. Actually his
father had no business of his own: he merely drove about and enabled
other people to attend to their business! He one day asked him why he
did not _sometimes_ do something for himself and the family!
Thus a leading trait in him gripped that branch of his father's life
where hung his service to others; and by this vital bond it lifted
itself up and began to flourish in its long travel toward maturity. He
literally took hold of his father, as a social implement, by the
well-worn handle of common use.
His presence in the buggy with his father was not incidental; it was the
doctor's design. He wished to have the boy along during these formative
years in order that he might get the right start toward the great things
of life as these one by one begin to break in upon the attention of a
growing boy. The doctor wanted to be the first to talk with him--the
first to sow the right suggestions: it was one of his sayings that the
earliest suggestions rooted in the mind of the child will be the final
things to drop from the dying man's brain: what goes in first comes out
last.
And so there began to be many conversations; incredible questions;
answers not always forthcoming. And a series of revelations ensued; the
boy revealing his growth to a watchful father, and a father revealing
his life to a very watchful son! These revelations began to look like
mile-stones on life's road, marked with further understandings.
Thus, one day when the boy was a good deal younger than now, his father
had come home and had gotten ready to go away again and was sitting
before the fire, looking gravely into it and taking solitary counsel
about some desperate case, as the country doctor must often do. Being a
very little fellow then, he had straddled one of his father's mighty
legs and had balanced himself by resting his hands on his father's
mighty shoulders.
"Is somebody very sick?"
The head under the weather-roughened hat nodded silently.
"I wonder how it happens that all the sick are in our neighborhood."
A smile flitted across the doctor's mouth.
"The sick are in all neighborhoods, little wonderer."
He said this cheerfully. It was his idea--and he tried to enforce it at
home--that young children must never, if possible, make the acquaintance
of the words _bad_ and _sad_--nor of the realities that are masked
behind them. He especially believed that what the old are familiar with
as life's tragic laws ought never to be told to children as tragic: what
is inevitable should never be presented to them as misfortunes.
Therefore he now declared that the sick are in all neighborhoods as he
might have stated that there are wings on all birds, or leaves on all
growing apple trees.
"Not all over the world?" asked the boy, enlarging his vision in space.
"All over the world," admitted the doctor with entire cheerfulness; the
fact was a matter of no consequence.
"Not all the time?" asked the boy, enlarging his outlook in time.
"All the time! All over the world and all the time!" conceded the
doctor, as though this made not the slightest difference to a human
being.
"Isn't there a single minute when everybody is well everywhere?"
"Not a single, solitary minute."
"Then somebody must always be suffering."
The doctor nodded again; the matter was not worth speaking of.
"Then somebody else must always be sorry."
The doctor bowed encouragingly.
"_Then I am sorry, too!_"
This time the doctor did not move his head, and he did not open his
lips. He saw that a new moment had arrived in the boy's growth--a
consciousness of the universal tragedy and personal share and sorrow in
it. He knew that many people never feel this; some feel it late; a few
feel it early; he had always said that children should never feel it. He
knew also that when once it has begun, it never ends. Nothing ever
banishes it or stills it--that perception of the human tragedy and one's
share and sorrow in it.
He did not welcome its appearance now, in his son least of all. For an
instant he charged himself with having made a mistake in taking the
child along on his visits to the sick, thus making known too early the
dark side of happy neighborhood life. Then he went further back and
traced this premature seriousness to its home and its beginning: in
prenatal depression--in a mother's anguish and a wife's despair. It was
a bitter retrospect: it kept him brooding.
The chatter was persistent. A hand was stretched up, and it took hold of
his chin and shook it:--
"There ought to be a country where nobody suffers and there ought to be
a time; a large country and a long time."
"There is such a country and there is such a time, Herbert," said the
doctor, now with some sadness.
"Then I'll warrant you it's part of the United States," cried the boy,
getting his idea of mortality slightly mixed with his early Americanism.
"Texas would hold them, wouldn't it? Don't you think Texas could contain
them all and contain them forever?"
The doctor laughed and seemed to think enough had been said on the
subject of large enough graveyards for the race.
"Why don't you doctors send your patients to that country?"
"Perhaps we do sometimes!" The doctor laughed again.
"Do you ever send yours?"
"Possibly."
"And how many do _you_ send?"
"I don't know!" exclaimed the doctor, laughing this time without being
wholly amused. "I don't know, and I never intend to try to find out."
"When I grow up we'll practise together and send twice as many," the boy
said, looking into his father's eyes with the flattery of professional
imitation.
"So we will! There'll be no trouble about that! Twice as many, perhaps
three times! No trouble whatever!"
He took the hands from his shoulders and laid them in the palm of his
and studied them--those masculine boyish hands that had never touched
any of the world's suffering. And then he looked at his own hands which
had handled so much of the world's suffering, but had never reached
happiness; happiness which for years had dwelt just at his finger-tips
but beyond arm's reach.
Not very long afterwards another conversation lettered another
mile-stone in the progress of mutual understanding.
It was a beautiful drowsy May morning near noon, and the two were
driving slowly homeward along the turnpike. When the lazily trotting
horse reached the front gate of a certain homestead, he stopped and
threw one ear backward as a living interrogation point. As his answer,
he got an unexpected cut in the flank with the tip of the lash that was
like the sting of a hornet: a reminder that the driver was not alone in
the buggy; that the horse should have known he was not alone; and that
what he did when alone was a matter of confidence between master and
beast.
The boy, who had been thrown backward, heels high, laughed as he settled
himself again on his cushion:--
"He thought you wanted to turn in."
"He thinks too much--sometimes."
"Don't they ever get sick there?"
"I suppose they do."
"_Then_ you turn in!"
"Then I _don't_ turn in."
"Aren't you their doctor?"
"I was the doctor once."
"Where was I?"
"I don't know where you were; you were not born."
"So many things happened before I was born; I wish they hadn't!"
"It is a pity; I had the same experience."
The buggy rolled slowly along homeward. On one side of the road were
fields of young Indian corn, the swordlike blades flashing in the sun;
on the other side fields of red clover blooming; the fragrance was
wafted over the fence to the buggy. Further, in a soft grassy lawn, on a
little knoll shaded by a white ash, a group of sleek cattle stood
content in their blameless world. Over the prostrate cows one lordly
head, its incurved horns deep hidden by its curls, kept guard. The scene
was a living Kentucky replica of Paul Potter's _Bull_.
"Drive!" murmured the doctor, handing over the reins; and he drew his
hat low over his eyes and set his shoulder against his corner of the
buggy; he often caught up with sleep while on the road. And he often
tried to catch up with thinking.
The horse always knew when the reins changed hands. He disregarded the
proxy, kept his own gait, picked the best of the road, and turned out
for passing vehicles. The boy now grasped the lines with unexpected
positiveness; and he leaned over and looked up under the rim of his
father's hat:--
"I hope the doctor they employ will give them the wrong medicines," he
confided. "I hope the last one of them will have many a rattling good
bellyache for their meanness to you!"
* * * * *
Then more years for father and son, each finding the other out.
And now finally on the morning of that twenty-fourth day of December,
the father was to witness a scene in the drama of his life as amazingly
performed by his son--illustrating what a little actor can do when he
undertakes to imitate an old actor to whom he is most loyal.
That morning after breakfast the apt pupil in Life's School had been
sent for, and when he had entered the library, his father was sitting
before the fire, idle. The buggy was not waiting outside; the hat and
overcoat and gloves were nowhere in sight; and he had not gotten ready
his satchel which took the place of the saddlebags of earlier
generations when the country doctor travelled around on horseback and
carried the honey of physic packed at his thighs--like a wingless,
befattened bumblebee. This morning it looked as though all the sick were
well at last; it was a sound if wicked world; and nothing was left for a
physician but to be happy in it--without a profession--and without
wickedness.
He threw himself into his father's impulsively opened arms, and was
heaved high into his lap. Though he was growing rather mature for laps
now; he was beginning to speculate about having something of a lap of
his own; quite a good deal of a lap.
"How is the children's epidemic to-day?"
"Never you mind about the children's epidemic! I'll take care of the
children's epidemic," repeated the doctor, pulling the long-faced,
autumn-faced prodigy of all questions between his knees and looking him
over with secret solicitude. "We'll not talk about sick children, but
about two well children--thanked be the Father of all children! So you
and Elsie are going away to help celebrate a Christmas Tree."
"Yes; but when are you going to have a Christmas Tree of our own?"
Now, that subject had two prongs, and the doctor seized the prong that
did not pierce family affairs--did not pierce _him_. He settled down to
the subject with splendid warmth and heartiness:--
"Well, let me see! You may have your first Christmas Tree as soon as you
are old enough to commence to do things for other people; as soon as you
can receive into your head the smallest hard pill of an idea about your
duty to millions and millions and millions of your fellow medicine
takers. Can you understand that?"
"Gracious! That would be a _big_ pill--larger than my head! I don't see
what it has to do with one miserable little dead pine tree!"
The doctor roared.
"It has this to do with one miserable dead pine tree: don't you know yet
that Christmas Trees are in memory of a boy who was once exactly your
age and height--and perhaps with your appetite--and with just as many
eyes and possibly even more questions? The boy grew up to be a man. The
man became a teacher. The teacher became a neighborhood doctor. The
neighborhood doctor became the greatest physician of the world--and he
never took a fee!"
"Ah, yes! But he wasn't a better doctor than _you_ are, was he? If he'd
come into this neighborhood and tried to practise, you'd soon have
ousted him, wouldn't you, with your doses and soups and jellies?"
"Humph!" grunted the doctor with a wry twist of the mouth; "I suppose I
would! Yes; undoubtedly I'd have ousted him! He could never have
competed with me in _my_ practice; never! But we won't try that hard
little pill of an idea any more. We'll drop the subject of Christmas
Trees for one more year. Perhaps by that time you can take the pill as a
powder! So! I hear you are going to attend a dancing party; we'll talk
about the party. And you are going over there to stay all night. I wish
I were going. I wish I were going over there to stay all night,"
reiterated the man, with an outrush of solemn tenderness that reached
back through vain years, through so many parched, unfilled years.
"I wish so, too," cried the boy, instantly burying his face on his
father's coat-sleeve, then lifting it again and looking at him with a
guilty flush which the doctor did not observe.
"Oh, do you! We won't say anything more about that, though I'm glad
you'd like to have me along. Now then; go and have a good time! And take
long steps and large mouthfuls! And you might do well to remember that a
boy's stomach is not a birdnest to be lined with candy eggs."
"I think candy eggs would make a very good lining, better than real
eggs; and about half the time you're trying to line me with them, aren't
you? With all the sulphur in them! And I do hate sulphur, and I have
always hated it since the boy at my desk in school wore a bag of it
around his neck under his shirt to keep off diseases. My! how he
smelt--worse than contagion! Candy eggs would make a very good lining;
even the regular soldiers get candy in their rations now. And they don't
have to eat new-laid eggs of mornings! Think of an army having to win a
hard-fought battle on soft-boiled eggs! They don't have to do _that_, do
they?"
"They do not!" said the doctor. "They positively do not! But we won't
say anything more about eggs--saccharine or sulphurous. What are you
going to do at the party?"
"I am going to dance."
"Alone? O dear! All alone? You'd better go skate on the ice! Not all
alone?"
"I should say not! With my girl, of course."
"That's better, much better. And then what?"
"I am going to promenade, with my girl on my arm."
"On _both_ arms, did you say?"
"No; on _one_ arm."
"Which?"
"Either."
"That sounds natural! (Heart action regular; brain unclouded;
temperature normal.) And then? What next?"
"I'm going to take the darling in to supper."
"Hold on! Not so fast! Suppose there isn't any supper--for the darling."
"Don't say that! It would nearly kill me! Don't you suppose there'll be
any supper?"
"I'm afraid there will be. Well, after the darling has had her fatal
supper? (Of course you won't want any!) What then?"
"What else is there to do?"
"You don't look as innocent as you imagine!"
"You don't have to confess what you'd like to do, do you? Would you have
told your father?"
"I don't think I would."
"Then I won't tell you."
"Then you needn't! I don't wish to know--only it must _not_ be on the
cheek! Remember, you are no son of mine if it's on the cheek!"
"I thought I heard you say _that_ got people into trouble."
"Maybe I did. I ought to have said it if I didn't; and it seems to be
the kind of trouble that you are trying to get into. (Temperature rising
but still normal. Respiration deeper. All symptoms favorable. No further
bulletins deemed necessary.) Well, then? Where were we?"
"Anyhow, I've never thought of cheeks when I've thought of _that_; I
thought cheeks were for chewing."
"Guardian Powers of our erring reason! Where did you get that idea--if
sanity can call it an idea?"
"Watching our cows."
The doctor laughed till tears ran down his face.
"You can't learn much about kissing by watching anybody's _cows_,
Governor," he said, wiping the tears away. "Not about _human_ kissing.
You must begin to direct your attention to an animal not so meek and
drivable. You must learn to consider, my son, that hornless wonder and
terror of the world who forever grazes but never ruminates!"
For years, in talking with a mind too young wholly to understand, he had
enjoyed the play of his own mind. He knew only too well that there are
few or none with whom a physician may dare have his sportive fling at
his fellow-creatures, at life in general. From a listener who never sat
in harsh judgment and who would never miscarry his random words, he had
upon occasion derived incalculable relief.
"Anyhow, I have learned that cows have the new American way of chewing;
so they never get indigestion, do they?"
"If they do, they cannot voice their symptoms in my mummied ears," said
the doctor, who often seemed to himself to have been listening to hue
and cry for medicine since the days of Thotmes. "However, we won't say
anything further about _that_! What else are you going to do over there?
This can't possibly be all!"
"To-night we children are going to sit up until midnight, to see whether
the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise on Christmas
Eve. We know they don't, but we're going to _prove_ they don't!"
"Where did you pick up that notion?"
"Where did you pick it up when you were a boy?"
"I fail to remember," admitted the doctor with mock dignity, damaged in
his logic but recalling the child legend that on the Night of the
Nativity universal nature was in sympathy with the miracle. All sentient
creatures were wakeful and stirring, and sent forth the chorus of their
cries in stables and barns--paying their tribute to the Divine in the
Manger and proclaiming their brotherhood with Him who was to bring into
the world a new gospel for them also.
"I don't know where I got that," he repeated. "Well, after the animals
bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise, then what?"
"There isn't but one thing more; but that is best of all!"
"You don't say! Out with it!"
"That is our secret."
The new decision of tone demonstrated that another stage had been
reached in their intercourse. The boy had withdrawn his confidence; he
had entered the ranks of his own generation and had taken his confidence
with him. Personally, also, he had shut the gate of his mind and the
gate was guarded by a will; henceforth it was to be opened by permission
of the guard. Something in their lives was abruptly ended; the father
felt like ending the talk.
"Very well, then; we won't say anything more about the secret. And now
you had better run along."
"But I don't want to run along just yet. It will be a long time before I
see you again; have you thought of that?"
He reversed his position so as to face the fire; and he crossed his feet
out beyond the promontory of the doctor's knees and folded his arms on
the rampart of those enfolding arms.
For a few moments there was intimate silence. Then he inquired:--
"How old must a boy be to ask a girl?"
A flame more tender and humorous burned in the doctor's eyes.
"Ask her _what_?"
"Ask her nothing! Ask _her_!"
"You mean _tell_ her, don't you? Not ask her, my friend and relative;
_tell_ her!"
"Well, ask her and tell her, too; they go together!"
"Is it possible! I'm always glad to learn!"
"Then, how old must he be?"
"Well, if you stand in need of the opinion of an experienced physician,
as soon as he learns to speak would be about the right period! That
would be the safest age! The patient would then have leisure to consider
his case before being affected by the disease. You could have time to
get singed and step away gradually instead of being roasted alive all at
once. Does that sound hard?"
"Not very! Do you love a girl longer if you tell her or if you don't
tell her?"
"I'm afraid nobody has ever tried _both_ ways! Suppose you try both, and
let us have the benefit of your experience."
"Well, then, if you love, do you love forever?"
The doctor laughed nervously and tightened his arms around the innocent.
"Nobody has lived forever yet--nobody knows!"
"But forever while you live--do you love as long as that?"
"You wouldn't know until you were dead and then it would be too late to
report. But aren't you doing a good deal of hard fighting this
morning,--on soft-boiled eggs,--though I think the victory is yours,
General, the victory is truly and honestly yours!"
"I can't stop thinking, can I? You don't expect me to stop thinking, do
you, when I'm just beginning really to think?"
"Very well, then, we won't say anything more about thinking."
"Then do you or don't you?"
"Now, what are you trying to talk about?" demanded the doctor angrily,
and as if on instant guard. A new hatred seemed coming to life in him;
there was a burning flash of it in his eyes.
"Just between ourselves--suppose that when I am a man and after I have
been married to Elizabeth awhile, I get tired of her and want a little
change. And I fell in love with another man's wife and dared not tell
her, because if I did I might get a bullet through me; would I love the
other man's wife more because I could not tell her, or would I love her
more because I told her and risked the bullet?"
Pall-like silence draped the room, thick, awful silence. The father
lifted his son from his lap to the floor, and turned him squarely around
and looked him in the eyes imperiously. Many a time with some such
screened but piercing power he, as a doctor, had scrutinized the faces
of children to see whether they were aware that some vast tragedy of
life was in the room with them. To keep them from knowing had often been
his main care; seeing them know had been life's last pity; young
children finding out the tragedies of their parents with one another--so
many kinds of tragedies.
"You had better go now," he urged gently. Then an idea clamped his brain
in its vise.
"And remember: while you are over there, you must try to behave with
your best manners because you are going to stay in the house of a great
lady. All the questions that you want to ask, ask me when you come back.
Ask _me_!"
The boy standing before his father said with a strange quietness and
stubbornness, probing him deeply through the eyes:--
"You haven't answered my _last_ question yet, have you?"
"Not yet," said the doctor, with strange quietness also.
The boy had never before heard that tone from his father.
"It's sad being a doctor, isn't it?" he suggested, studying his father's
expression.
"What do _you_ know about sad? Who told _you_ anything about sad?"
muttered the doctor with new sadness now added to old sadness.
"Nobody _had_ to tell me! I knew without being told."
"Run along now."
"Now I'll walk along, but I won't run along. I'll walk away from you,
but I won't run away from you."
He wandered across the room, and stood with his hand reluctantly turning
the knob. Then with a long, silent look at his father--he closed the
door between them.
III
THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
DR. BIRNEY stood motionless in the middle of the room with his gaze
riveted on the door through which his son had lingeringly disappeared.