quietness: the sun always seemed to remain on his face after it had gone
down. "They will be bred by some one else. The breeding of horses in the
world will not be stopped because some one does not wish to breed them.
It will come to the same thing in the end. Even if it does not come to
the same thing, it will come to something different. No matter, either
way."
The young hunter had unbuttoned one of his shirt sleeves and bared his
arm above the elbow; and he now stroked his forearm as he bent it
backward over the biceps and suddenly struck out at the air as though he
would knock the head off of an idea.
"My notion is this: I don't want to stand still and let my horse do the
running. If I have a horse, I want it to stand still and let me do the
running. If there is any excitement for either of us, I want the
excitement. I don't care _to own_ an animal that wins a race: I want _to
be_ the animal that wins a race."
"Then be the animal that wins the race! The horse will win his races: he
will take care of himself: win your race."
"I intend to win my race."
There was silence for a while.
"As it is not to be horses, then, I have been thinking of other things I
might do."
"Keep on thinking."
"You might help me to think."
"I am ready to think with you; you can only think for yourself."
"What about going into the army?"
"You just said you wanted excitement. There is no excitement in the army
unless there is war. We have just passed through one war, and I don't
think either of us will live to see another. Still, if you wish, I can
get you to West Point. Or, if you prefer the navy, I can get you to
Annapolis."
"No Annapolis for me! I wouldn't live on anything that I couldn't walk
about on and sit down on and roll over on. No water for me. I'll take
land all round me in every direction. I guess I'll leave the sea to the
Apostle Peter. Life on land and death on land for me. Hard showers and
streams and ponds and springs--that will do for water. No Annapolis,
thank you!"
"West Point, then."
"If I went into the army, wouldn't I have to leave the farm here?"
"You'd have to leave the farm here unless the Government would quarter
some troops here for your accommodation. In case of war, you might
arrange with the enemy to come to Kentucky and attack you where you
would be comfortable."
The future officer of his country did not smile at this: his manner
seemed to indicate that such a concession might not be so absurd. He did
not budge from his position:--
"I'd rather do something that would let me live here."
"You could live here and study law: some of the greatest members of the
Kentucky bar have been farmers. You could live here and practise law in
the country seat."
"Suppose I studied law and then some day I were called to the Supreme
Bench: wouldn't that take me away?"
"It might take you away unless the Supreme Court would get down from its
Bench and come and sit on your bench--always to accommodate you."
"I don't know about law: I'll have to think: law _does_ make you think!"
"There is the pulpit: some of the greatest Kentucky divines have been
bluegrass farmers--though I've always wished that they wouldn't call
themselves divines. It's more than Christ did!"
"The pulpit! And then all my life I'd be thinking of other people's
faults and failings. A fine time I'd have, trying to chase my friends to
hell."
The next suggestion followed in due order.
"There's Oratory; some of the great Kentucky orators have been bluegrass
farmers. There is Southern Oratory."
"Oratory--where would I get my gas?"
"Manufacture it. It always has to be manufactured. The consumer always
manufactures."
"If I went in for oratory, you _know_ I'd come out in Congress; you know
they always do: then no farm for me again."
"That is, unless--you know, Congress might adjourn and hold its
sessions--that same idea--to accommodate you--!"
"I'd like to be a soldier and I'd like to be a farmer, if I could get
the two professions together."
"They went together regularly in pioneer Kentucky. The soldiers were
farmers and the farmers were soldiers."
"And then if I could be a doctor. That's what I'd like best. To be a
soldier and a farmer and a doctor."
"Men were all three in pioneer Kentucky. During the period of Indian
wars the Kentucky farmer and soldier, who was the border scout, was also
sometimes the scout of Æsculapius."
"Æsculapius--who was he? Trotter, runner, or pacer?"
"He set the pace: you might call him a pacer."
* * * * *
What a sense of deep peace and security and privacy there was in the two
being thus free to talk together of life and the world--in that
womanless house! No woman sitting beside the fire to interject herself
and pull things her way; or to sit by without a sign--and pull things
her way afterwards--without a sign.
The physical comfort of the night, and the rain, and the snug hearth
awoke a desire for more confidences.
"Tell me about the medical schools when you were a student. Not about
the professors. I don't want to hear anything about the professors. You
wouldn't know anything about _them_, anyhow: no student ever does. But
what were the students up to among themselves at nights? The wild ones.
I don't want to hear anything about the goody-goody ones. Tell me about
the devils--the worst of the devils."
The medical schools of those days, as members of the profession yet
living can testify if they would, had their stories of student life that
make good stories when recited around the fireside with September rain
on the roof. The former graduate and non-practitioner was not averse
seemingly to reminiscence. Forthwith he entered upon some chronicles and
pursued them with that soft, level voice of either betting with you or
baptizing you--the voice of gambling in this world or of gambling for
the next.
As the recitals wound along their channels, the listener's enthusiasm
became stirred: by degrees it took on a kindling that was like a wild
leaping flame of joy.
"But there always has to be a leader," he said, as though forecasting
for himself a place of such splendid prominence. "There has to be a
leader, a head."
"I was the head."
The young hunter on the opposite side of the fireplace suddenly threw up
his arms and rolled out of his chair and lay on the floor as though he
had received a charge of buckshot in one ear. At last, gathering himself
up on the floor, he gazed at the tranquil amber pipe and tranquil
piper:--
"_You!_"
There was a mild wave of the hand by the historian of the night, much as
one puts aside a faded wreath, deprecating being crowned with it a
second time.
"Another shock like that----!" and the searcher for a profession climbed
with difficulty into his chair again. For a while there was satisfied
silence, and now things took on a graver character:--
"Somehow I feel," said the younger of the men, "that there have been
great men all about here. I don't see any now; but I have a feeling that
they have been here--great men. I feel them behind me--all kinds of
great men. It is like the licks where we now find the footprints and the
bones of big game, larger animals that have vanished. There are the
bones of greater men in Kentucky: I feel their lives behind me."
"They _are_ behind you: the earth is rank with them. You need not look
anywhere else for examples. I don't know how far you got in your Homer
at school before you were tired of it; but there is the _Iliad_ of
Kentucky: I am glad you have begun to read _that_!"
The rain on the shingles and in the gutters began to sound like music.
The two men alone there in their talk about life, not a woman near, a
kind of ragged sublimity.
"To be a soldier and to be a farmer--if I could get those two
professions together," persisted the youth.
"In times of peace there is only one profession that furnishes the
active soldier: and that is the profession of medicine. It is the
physician and the surgeon that the military virtues rest on; and the
martial traits when there is no war. It is these men that bring those
virtues and those traits undiminished from one war to the next war.
There is no kind of manhood in the soldier, the fighting man, that is
not in the fighting physician and fighting surgeon--fighting against
disease. There is nothing that has to be changed in these two when war
breaks out or when peace comes: their constant service fits them for
either. In times of peace the only warlike type of man actively engaged
in human life is the doctor and surgeon. Did you ever think of that?"
said the older man, persuasively.
The silence in the room grew deeper.
"Tell me about the professions in the War: what did they do about it;
how did they act?"
"The professions divided: some going with North, some going with South;
fighting on each side, fighting one another. The ministry dividing most
bitterly and sending up their prayers on each side for the destruction
of the other--to the same God. All except one: the profession of
medicine remained indivisible. For that is the profession which has but
a single ideal, a single duty, a single work, and but one patient--Man."
The silence had become too deep for words.
The young hunter quietly got up and lit his candle and squared himself
in the middle of the floor, pale with the sacred fire of a youth's
ideal.
"I am going to be a Kentucky country doctor. Good night!" He strode
heavily out of the room, and his stride on the stairway sounded like an
upward march toward future glory.
The man at the fire listened. Usually when the youth had reached his
room above and set his candle on his stand beside his bed, he undressed
there as with one double motion of shucking an ear of corn: half to
right and half to left; and then the ear stood forth bared in its
glistening whiteness and rounded out to perfect form with clean
vitality. But now for a long time he heard a walking back and forth, a
solemn tread: life's march had begun in earnest.
He rose from his chair and tapped the ash out of his meerschaum. Through
force of habit and old association with the race-course he looked at his
timepiece.
"I win that race in good time," he said. "That colt was hard to manage,
obstreperous and balky."
It had always been his secret wish that his nephew would enter the
profession that he himself had spurned. Perhaps no man ever ceases to
have some fondness for the profession he has declined, as perhaps a
woman will to the last send some kind thoughts toward the man she has
rejected.
After winning a race, he always poured out a libation; and he went to
his sideboard now and poured out a libation sixteen years old.
And he did not pour it on the ground.
* * * * *
And now eight years followed, during which the youth Downs Birney became
young Dr. Birney--a very great stage of actual progress. Seven away from
Kentucky, and one there since his return. Of those seven, five in New
York for a degree; and two in Europe--in Berlin, in Vienna--for more
lectures, more hospital work, another degree. At the end of the second
he returned incredibly developed to Kentucky, to the manor house and the
stock farm; and to the uncle to whom these years had furnished abundance
of means whereby to get the best of all that was wisely to be gotten: an
affectionate abundance, no overfond super-abundance, no sentimentality:
merely a quiet Kentucky sun throwing the energy of its rays along that
young life-track--hanging out a purse of gold at each quarter-stretch,
to be snatched as the thoroughbred passed.
A return home then to a neighborhood of kinships and friendships and to
the uphill work which could so easily become downhill sliding--the
practice of medicine among a people where during these absences he had
been remembered, if remembered at all, as the wildest youth in the
country. When it had been learned what profession he had chosen, the
prediction had been made that within a year Downs would reduce the
mortality of the neighborhood to normal--one to every inhabitant!
But at the end of this first year of undertaking to convert ridicule
into acceptance of himself as a stable health officer and confidential
health guardian, he was able to say that he had made a good start:
neighbors have long memories about a budding physician's first
cases--when he fails. Young Dr. Birney had not failed, because none of
his cases had been important: when there was danger, it was considered
safe to avoid the doctor: the only way in which he could have lost a
patient would have been to murder one! Thus he had entered auspiciously
upon the long art and science of securing patients. But he had secured
no wife! And he greatly preferred one impossible wife to all possible
patients. That problem meantime had been pressing him sorely.
The womanless house in which he had been reared and his boyhood on a
stock farm had rendered him rather shy of girls and kept him much apart
from the society of the neighborhood. Nevertheless even in Europe before
his return--with the certainty of marriage before him--he had recalled
two or three juvenile perturbations, and he had resolved upon arrival to
follow these clues and ascertain what changes seven years had wrought in
them. There was no difficulty in following the clues a few weeks after
getting back to Kentucky: they led in each case to the door of a growing
young family: and out of these households he thereupon began to receive
calls for his services to sick children: all the perturbations had
become volcanoes, and were now on their way to become extinct craters.
So he was clueless. He must make his own clues and then follow. Nor
could there be any dallying, since he could not hope to succeed in his
profession as a young unmarried physician: thus pressure from without
equalled pressure from within.
Moreover, he was pleasantly conscious of a general commotion of part of
the population toward him with reference to life's romance. The girls of
that race and land were much too healthy and normally imaginative not to
feel the impact of the arrival of a young doctor--who was going to ask
one of them to marry him. As to those seven years of his in New York and
Europe, he could discover only one mind in them: they deplored his
absence not because they had missed _him_, but because he had missed
_them_: it was no gain to have been in New York and Berlin and Vienna if
you lost Kentucky! He gradually acquired the feeling that if in addition
to the misfortune of having been absent for several years, the calamity
had been his of having been born abroad, it would not have been
permitted him to plough corn.
But while they could not abet him in the error of thinking that he had
returned a cosmopolitan, bringing high prestige, instantly they showed
general excitement that he--one of themselves--was at home again in
search of a wife. He had arrived like a starving bee released in a ripe
vineyard; and for a while he could only whirl about, distracted by
indecision as to what cluster of grapes he should settle on: not that
the grapes did not have something to say as to the privilege of
alighting. After the bee had selected the bunch, the bunch selected the
bee. A vineyard ripe to be gathered--and being gathered! Every month or
so a vine disappeared--claimed for Love's vintage--stored away in Love's
cellar.
They were everywhere! As he drove widely about the country, the two most
abundant characteristics seemed to be unequalled grass and marriageable
girls. He met them on turnpikes and lanes--in leafy woods at picnics--at
moonlight dances--on velvet lawns--amid the roses of old gardens--and he
began humorously to count those who looked available. One passed him on
the road one day, and, lifting a corner of the buggy curtain, she peeped
back at him: "She will do!" he said. Another swept past him on horseback
and looked in the opposite direction. "She will do!" he said. He met two
on a shady street of a quiet town under their peach-blow parasols: "They
will do!" he said. He saw four on a lawn playing tennis, and watched
their vital abandon and tasted their cup: "They will do!" he said. He
swept his eyes over a ball-room one night: "They will all do!" he said,
and made an end of counting.
Into this world of romance and bride-seeking the doctor launched himself
formally under brilliant auspices of earth and sky and people one
beautiful afternoon of early summer: it was on the grounds of one of the
finest old country places at a lawn party with tennis matches. It was
his first appearance as a candidate for life's greater game. A large
gallery of onlookers, seated along a trellis of vines and roses,
measured him critically as he stepped out on the court: he knew it and
he challenged the criticism. In his white flannels; his big bared head
covered with curling black hair; his neck half bare in its virile
strength; his big grayish blue eyes flashing with glorious health, full
of good humor and of deeper warmth; his big half-bared arms strong to
hold in love or to lift in pain; the big stub nose of tenacity; the big
red mouth that laughing revealed the big thick white teeth, good to tear
and grind their way: his twenty-six years of native Kentucky insolence
capped with a consciousness of travel and knowledge of his own authority
and power--youthful white soldier of the clean,--the neighborhood's
evangelist of life and death,--he looked like a good partner for the
afternoon or for life. One girl, seeing all this--and more--repeated to
herself, she did not know why, Blake's poem on the Tiger.
His partner that afternoon was his hostess--a Kentucky girl just home
from her Northern college as a graduate. She too had been away for
several years; and they had this in common as the first bond--that they
had arrived as comparative strangers and saw their home surroundings
from the outside: they spoke of it: it introduced them.
There was tension in the play for this reason; and for others: this
first public appearance with so much going on in imagination and
sympathy. Too great tension developed as the battle of the racquets went
on: so that the doctor's partner, overreaching and twisting, sprained an
ankle, and the games ended for them: she was assisted upstairs, and he
applied his skill and his treatment.
As he drove home he thought a good deal of his partner: of her proud
reserve toward him out of the game and of her inseparable blending of
herself with him in the game; her devotion to their common cause; her
will not that she should win but that both should win; her unruffled
ignoring of a bad play of his or a bad play of her own; the freshened
energy of her attack after a reverse; her matter-of-course pleasure when
he played well or when she played well; the complete surrender of
herself to him for the game--after which instantly there was nothing
between them except the courtesy of a hostess. He thought of these
traits. And then he recalled her fortitude during the acute suffering
with that twisted ankle! How contemptuously she had borne pain!
"That little foot," he said, moved to admiration, "that little foot
makes the true footprint of the greater vanished people! She is of the
blood of male and female heroes: she knows how to do and she knows how
to suffer! Now if I fall in love with her--!" and there surged through
him the invitation to do so.
But at the end of his first year the doctor felt that he had made only a
general advance toward the long battle-line of Love; he had
reconnoitred, but he had not attacked; he had a vast marital receptivity
embracing many square miles. He had slid his hands along the nuptial
rope, but he could not as yet discover who was waiting beside the bridal
knot.
On the other hand, there were two or three cases of wounded on the other
side; and if one could have been privileged to stand near, it would have
been possible to see Love's ambulances secretly and mournfully moving
here and there to the rear. If as much as this could not be said for
him, what right would he have had to be practising there--or to be alive
anywhere!
* * * * *
And now the winter of that first year had come: it brought an immense
stride--in Progress.
It was the twenty-fourth of December. Darkness was beginning to fall on
road and woods and fields; and he was driving rapidly home because he
was tired and ravenous and because he was thinking of his supper--always
that good Kentucky supper. But to-night he would have to eat solitary
because some days previous his uncle had gone to New York--gone in his
quiet way: announcing the fact one morning and stopping there--his
reasons were his own.
About a mile from home the doctor's horse, rushing on through the
gathering Christmas twilight, began to overtake a vehicle moving at a
stately pace as though its mission involved affairs too elaborate for
haste. As he approached from the rear he recognized that it was
Frederick Ousley's carriage, returning from his afternoon wedding
several miles across the country.
He had never met the girl that his friend was to marry: her home was in
another neighborhood, and the demands of this first year upon him had
been too many. He had not even had time to go to the wedding. Now he
checked his horse in order not to pass the carriage, and at a respectful
distance of a few yards constituted himself its happy procession. At the
front gate it turned in and rolled through the woods to the house, the
windows of which were blazing with candles--bridal lights and the lights
of Christmas Eve! He stopped at the gate and followed the progress of it
as it intercepted the lights now of one window and now of another as it
wound along the drive. Leaning forward with his forearms on his knees
and peering from the side-curtain, he saw the front doors thrown open,
or knew this by the flood of radiance that issued from the hall; saw the
young master of the house walk to the top step of his porch and there
turn and wait to receive his bride--in true poetic and royal and manly
fashion: wishing her to come to him as he faced her on his threshold; he
saw arms outstretched toward her, saw her mount falteringly and give her
hands; and saw them walk side by side into the hall: the servants closed
in upon them, the doors closed upon the servants.
Christmas Eve--Night of Nativity--Home--Youth--Love--Firelight and
Darkness--One another!
As the doctor watched, that vision sank into him as an arrow which had
been shot into the air years before and had now hit its mark. He
straightened himself abruptly and gave the rein to his horse with a
feeling that the shaft stuck in its wound. Then with a vigorous shake of
his head he said to himself:--
"Dr. Birney, there is a young man in this buggy who needs your best
attention: see that he gets it and gets it quickly."
He found his supper awaiting him: and some intelligence which drove
appetite away and drove him away, leaving the supper uneaten: it was a
letter from his uncle--one of those tranquil letters:--
"They think they will have to perform an operation on me, but I want
your opinion first. I trust your judgment beyond that of any of them,
old and experienced as they are: and I should have sought your judgment
before coming away if I could have felt sure that it would be needed:
unless it were needed, I did not wish you to know. You had better start
without losing very much time. They seem to regard the case as urgent
and uncertain.
"If anything should happen before you are able to reach me, these few
words will be my last.
"You have long since entered, Downs, into possession of part of what you
will inherit from me: and that is your acquaintance with the
imperfections of my character and the frailties of my life. There has
been much in it that even a worse man might regret, but nothing of which
any better man could be ashamed. You have always guarded this part of
your inheritance as your sacred private personal property. My request is
that you will hereafter make as little account of it as possible; I hope
you will never be tempted to draw upon it as a valuable fund; and as
early as time permits, put the memory of it away to gather its oblivion
and its dust.
"You will find that everything of value I possess has been left to you.
You think I have loved horses; I have loved nothing but you. I have
loved you because you were worthy of it; but I should have loved you if
you had not been worthy. The horses meant a good deal to me in life, but
they mean nothing in death.
"I believe you will be one more great Kentucky country doctor. And
whatever race you may have to run in this world, whether you win or
whether you lose, I know it will be a hard, a gallant, struggle: that is
all the thoroughbred can ever do. Having delivered over to you
everything I own and retaining only the things I cannot will away,--my
judgment, my confidence in you, and my devotion to you,--I wager these
that you will win life's race and win it gloriously. My last bet--with
my last coin--you will win!
"If this is good-by--good-by."
It was several weeks before he returned, bringing with him all that was
earthly of one whose races were over and who himself had just been
entered for the unknown stake of the Great Futurity.
* * * * *
Now February had reappeared, and with it came another stage of Progress.
When he entered the breakfast room one morning--always to a hearty
breakfast--he went first to the windows and looked out at the low dark
clouds shrouding the sky and the rapidly whitening earth: it was snowing
heavily. As he turned within, the bleakness out of doors brightened the
fire and added its comfort to the breakfast table. While he was pouring
out his coffee, suddenly through one window an object appeared; and
looking out, he saw Frederick Ousley on horseback at the foot of the
pavement: he was but half seen, laughing and beckoning amid the thickly
falling flakes.
The doctor rushed out to the porch, and young Ousley spurred his horse
up to the side of it, riding over flower-beds, trampling and ruining
plants that happened not now to be in bloom. The two friends after a
long crushing grip poured out their friendship with eye and speech,
greeting and laughter.
Two products of that land. With much in sympathy, with no outward
resemblance: one of little mingled Anglo-Saxon blood: the other of
Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon strains which have created so much history
wherever they have made their mortal fight. The young Kentucky
Anglo-Saxon on his horse, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with heavy body and
heavy limbs, a superb animal to begin with, wheresoever and in
whatsoever the animal might end: the snow on the edges of his yellowish
hair and close-clipped beard; around his neck, just visible inside his
upturned coat collar, a light blue scarf, a woman's scarf, tied there as
he had started by tender fingers that had perhaps craved the mere
touching of his flesh: the scarf, as it were, of Lohengrin blue; for
there was something so knightly about him, he radiated such a passion of
clean young manhood, that you all but thought of him as a Kentucky
Lohengrin--whom no Elsa had questioned too closely, and for whom there
would never be a barren return to Montserrat.
Facing him, the young Kentucky Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon, physical equal,
physical opposite: dark and swarthy soldier of the South: as he stood
there giving you no notion that for him waited the crimson-dyed cup of
Life's tragic brew, topped at this moment with the white dancing foam of
youth and happiness.
They talked rapidly of many things. Then the object of the visit was
disclosed--with an altered voice and manner:--
"As soon as you have had breakfast, Downs, I wish you would come over.
Mrs. Ousley is not very well. She would like to see you."
Then he added with affectionate seriousness: "I have told her about you:
how we have known each other all our lives, have played together, hunted
together, slept together, travelled together, studied together. She
knows all about you! I have prepared the way for you to be her
physician. There was a great difficulty there--that question of her
physician: you will know _that_, when you know _her_!"
A new look had come into his eyes: he stood as on the peak of
experience--the true mountain-top of the life of this world.
"I will come at once."
Young Ousley, with a sudden impulse, perhaps to conceal his own sacred
emotion, rode over to a window of the breakfast room and peered in at
the waiting table with its solitary chair at the head. He raised his
voice as though speaking to an imaginary person inside:
"How do you do, Mrs. Birney?" he said. "Could I speak to the doctor a
moment? I should like to have his private ear professionally: could you
pass one of his ears out?"
The doctor stooped and scraped together a snowball from the edge of the
porch, and with a soft toss hit him in the face:--
"Take that for speaking to Mrs. Birney through a window! And Mrs. Birney
is not my office boy. And I do the passing out of my own ears--to any
desired distance."
The young husband rode back to the porch, wiping the snow out of his
laughing eyes: they looked blue as with the clear laughter of the sky.
"That will never do!" he said with a backward motion of his head toward
the solitary chair at the breakfast-table. "What right have you to
defraud a girl out of all that happiness?"
"I am not defrauding a girl out of all that happiness: I am being
defrauded. I am not the culprit: I am the victim. As a consequence of
trying to save the lives of other husbands, I have nearly come to my own
death as a bachelor: I have about succumbed to inanition: I am a mere
Hamlet of soliloquy--and abstention."
It was the last playfulness of boyhood friendship, of a return to old
ways of jesting when jesting meant nothing. But the glance into the
breakfast room--those rallying words--the return of the snowball into
the face--were the ending of a past: each felt that this was enough of
it.
As young Ousley rode away, he wheeled his horse at the distance of some
yards and called back formally:--
"Mrs. Ousley would like to see you as soon as you can come, doctor."
It was a professional command.
"I'll come immediately after breakfast."
"Thank you."
"Thank _you!_"
They had assumed another relation in life: on one side of a chasm was a
young husband with his bride; on the other, the family physician.
As Dr. Birney poured out his coffee and buttered his biscuit, he said to
himself that now the bread of life was being buttered.
When he reached the Ousleys', the youthful husband met him on the
veranda and threw an arm around his shoulder affectionately and led him
in; and when some time later they reappeared, both talked gravely and
parted, bound by a new bond of dependence and helpfulness between man
and man.
For the next few days there developed in Dr. Birney a novel
consciousness that his interest in marriage had enormously deepened, but
that interest in his own marriage had received a setback: the feeling
was genuine, and it troubled him. The tentative advances into social
life that he had been making seemed to have ended in blind paths; the
growing ties snapped like threads upon which some displaced weight has
fallen.
What he had been looking for it seemed to him that he had found too late
in Josephine Ousley. Had he found her before her marriage, he would have
looked at no other, nor have wavered a year. The actual significance of
this was that he had encountered one of the persistent dreams of
mankind--the dream of ideal love and ideal marriage with one who is
unattainable.
The history of the race, of its art, of its literature, has borne
through ages testimony to the vividness and to the tyranny of this
obsession, this mistake, or this truth which may be one of Nature's
deepest. For it may be error and it may be truth, or sometimes the one
and sometimes the other. It may be one of the vast forces in Nature
which we are but now beginning to observe--one of her instincts of
intuitive selection which announces itself instantly and is never to be
reversed: such an instinct as governs the mating of other lives not
human. But there it is in our own species for us to make out of it what
we can. There are men who for the rest of their lives look back upon the
mere sight of some woman, a solitary brief meeting with her, as though
that were their natural and perfect union. There are women who are
haunted by the same influence and allegiance to some man--seen
once--perhaps never seen at all except in a picture. Among the dreams of
humanity about ideal strength, ideal wisdom, ideal justice and charity
and friendship, this must be set apart as its dream of ideal love; and
as all high and beautiful dreams about human nature are welcome,
provided only we never awaken from them, let those who dream thus dream
on. But the tragedy of it falls upon those who in actual life
practically supplant the imagined. Let Petrarch dream of Laura, let
Dante dream of Beatrice, if only the perfections of Laura and Beatrice
do not come into judgment against the actual wives of Petrarchs and
Dantes. Let the ideal love of Romeo and Juliet gladden mankind only as a
dream of the unfulfilled.
Dr. Birney had fallen under the influence of this error, or this truth:
the bride of his friend instantly filled his imagination as that vision
of perfection which dreams alone bring to visit us. He was not yet in
love with her, not a feeling of his nature had yet made its start
towards her: but she had declared herself as for him the ideal
woman--ensphered in the unattainable. As proof of this she released in
him from the hour of his meeting her finer things than he had been aware
of in his own nature: her countenance, her form, her voice, her whole
presence, her spirit, disclosed for him for the first time the whole
glory and splendor of human life and of a man's union with a woman.
As he tried to withdraw his mind from this belief and fix it upon his
own separate future, he discovered that his outlook was no longer single
nor clear. Something stood in his path--an irremovable obstacle.
Sometimes in sleep we try to drive around an obstruction in our road,
and as often as we drive around it it reappears where it was before:
such an obstruction had obtruded itself across his progress.
During the following weeks he was often at the Ousleys'--to supper, as a
guest in their carriage on visits and to parties: the three were almost
inseparable. One night at supper young Ousley again brought up the
subject of the doctor's marriage and twitted him for hesitancy:
unexpectedly the subject was thrust back into the speaker's teeth: there
was an awkward silence--very curious--
* * * * *
And now there befell the doctor one of those peculiar little
progressions or retrogressions which prove a man not to be utterly
forlorn. He had ceased to make social calls, and had begun to decline
invitations; and so into the air there was wafted that little myth which
went wandering over the country from house to house: the familiar little
myth that he had been rejected. This myth of the rejected!--this little
death-web wound about the unsuccessful suitor: every eligible man is as
much entitled to one as every caterpillar to his cocoon.
* * * * *
He was with Mrs. Ousley when her child was born--he saved her life and
the child's life and his friend's happiness. And in response he found
that both of them were now drawing him into that closer friendship which
rests upon danger shared and passed--upon respect and power.
The first day that Mrs. Ousley sat in her drawing-room with her infant
across her knees the doctor was there; and as he studied the perfect
group--husband and wife and child--it seemed to him that behind them
should have shone the full-orbed golden splendor of this life's ideal
happiness.
"There is only one way out of it for me," he muttered bitterly as he
went down the steps. "I must marry and fall in love with my own wife and
with the mother of my own children."
That afternoon he drove toward the stately homestead of the summer lawns
and tennis matches--but when he reached the front gate, he drove past.
It was a few months after this, toward the end of a long conversation
with Mrs. Ousley, in which _she_ now broached with feminine tact and
urgency the subject of his marriage, it was as he told her good-by that
there escaped from him the first intimation of his love--unexpectedly as
an electric spark flashing across a vacuum.
When he was miles away he said to himself:
"This must stop--this must be stopped: if I cannot stop it, some one
else must help me to stop it."
That afternoon he began again his visits to the stately homestead of the
lawns and the tennis courts; and a month or two later he drove by and
said to Mrs. Ousley:--
"I am engaged to be married."
She gave him a quick startled look, thinking not of him, but with a
woman's intuitive forecast sending her sympathy and apprehension on into
the life of another woman.
One beautiful summer night of the year following there were bridal
fights gleaming far and wide over the grounds of this stately country
place and from all the windows of the house.
The doctor was married.
* * * * *
About a year later there reached Dr. Birney one morning a piece of
evidence as to how his reputation was spreading: from another
neighborhood a farmer of small means rode to his door and besought him
to come and see a member of his family: this request implied that the
regular family physician had been passed over, supplanted; and when the
poor turn against their physicians and discharge them, it is a bad sign
indeed--for the physicians.
The doctor upon setting out sent his thoughts to this professional
brother who had been discredited: he would gladly have saved him from
the wound.
A few miles up the pike he was surprised to meet a well-known physician
from the city: they knew each other socially and checked their horses to
exchange greetings.
Dr. Birney lost no time in saying:--
"If you are on the way to my house, I'll turn back."
"I'm going to the Ousleys'. Professor Ousley asked me yesterday to come
out and see Mrs. Ousley: he said it was her wish."
The two physicians quickly parted with embarrassment.
As Dr. Birney drove on he had received the wound which sometimes leaves
a physician with the feeling that he has tasted the bitterness of his
own death: he himself had been pushed aside--discarded from the
household that meant most to him as physician and man.
He pulled his horse's head into a dirt road and crossed to another
turnpike and visited his new patient and went on to another county seat
and put up his horse at a livery stable to be groomed and fed and took
his dinner at the little tavern and wandered aimlessly about the town
and started back towards sundown and reached home late in the night and
went to his rooms without awaking his wife. As he lighted his lamp in
the library under its rays he saw a note from Mrs. Ousley to them,
asking their company to supper next evening. His wife had pencilled
across the top of the page a message that she would not go.
"It is their good-by to me," he said; "when my wife knows that they have
discharged me, as a woman understands another woman in such a matter,
she will know the reason; and she will see fully at last what she began
to see long since."
When he went to the Ousleys', Mrs. Ousley came forward to greet him at
the side of her husband, and she gave him both hands. And she did what
she had never done before--she tried with her little hands to take his
big ones--the hands that had saved her life; and out of the intensity
and solemnity of her gratitude she looked him in the eyes until the lids
fell over hers. It was like saying:--
It is not your fault, it is not my fault, it is not the fault of any of
us: it is life and the fault of life. As I let you go, dear friend, I
cling to you.
When the evening was over and the moment had come to leave, she was at
the side of her husband again; and under the chandelier in the hall she
suddenly looked up to it with a beautiful mystical rapture and
consecration--as if to the mistletoe of her bridal eve.
And now more years--years--years! But what effect have years upon the
master passions? What are five years to a master Hatred? What are ten
years to Revenge? What are twenty to Malice? What is half a century to
Patience, or fourscore years to Loyalty, or fourscore and ten to
Friendship, or the last stretch of mortality to waiting Love? The noble
passions grow in nobility; the ignoble ones grow in ignominy.
And thus it came about that the final stage of the doctor's Progress
attained dimensions large enough to contain Hogarth's most human four:
for it represented that _Progress of the Rake_ which sometimes in
everyday reality coincides with the _Progress of the Harlot_ and with
the _Progress of Marriage à la Mode_ and with the _Progress of Cruelty_:
so that he thus achieved as much by way of getting on as may be
reasonably demanded of any plodding man.
* * * * *
It was an August day in this same year which was now closing its record
with the thoughtful days of December. It was afternoon, and it was
Saturday.
Intervening years had developed the doctor in two phases of growth: he
looked no older, but he was heavier in trunk and limbs; and he was
weightier in repute, for he had established far and near his fame as a
physician. He had patients in remote county seats now, and on this day
he had been to one of those county seats to visit a patient, and had
found him mending. As he quitted the house with this responsibility
dropped, it further reminded him that within the range of his practice
he had not for the moment a single case of critical illness or of any
great suffering. Whereupon he experienced the relief, the elastic
rebound, known perhaps only to physicians when for a term they may take
up relations of entire health and happiness with their fellow-beings:
and when you cease to deal with pain, you begin to deal with pleasure.
With a new buoyancy of foot and feeling he started down to Cheapside,
the gathering-place for farmers and merchants and friendly town
folk--most of all on Saturdays. As he strolled along, the recollection
wandered back to him of how in years gone by--when he was just old
enough to begin to shave--it was the excitement of the week to shave and
take his bath and don his best and come to town to enjoy Saturday
afternoon on Cheapside. The spirit of boyhood flowed back to him: he
bathed in a tide of warm mysterious waters.
When he reached the public square, he began to shake hands and rub
shoulders; and to nod at more distant acquaintances; and once under the
awning of a store for agricultural implements he paused squarely before
a group of farmers sitting about on ploughs and harrows. They were all
friends, and at the sight of him they rose in a group, seized him and
marched him off with them to the hotel to dinner whither they were just
starting. They were hearty men; it was a hearty meal; there was hearty
talk, hearty laughter. Middle-aged, red-blooded men of overflowing
vitality, open-faced, sunbrowned; eating meat like self-unconscious
carnivora and drinking water like cattle: premium animals in prime
condition and ready for action: on each should have been tied the blue
ribbon of agricultural fairs.
The hotel dinner was unusually rich that day because a great circus and
menagerie had pitched its tents in a vacant lot on the edge of town; and
there was to be an afternoon and an evening performance, and the town
was crowded.
The doctor's dinner companions were to join their wives and children at
the grounds, and very reluctantly he declined their urging to go along:
as they separated, there rose in him fresh temptation about old Saturday
afternoon liberties and pleasures--and there fell upon him as a blight
the desolation of his own home life.
He made his way through excited throngs to the livery stable, and had
soon started. On the way across town, above low roofs and fences, he
caught sight of weather-stained canvas tents, every approach toward
which now had its rolling tide of happy faces, young and aged. At a
cross street the hurrying people flowed so thoughtlessly about his
buggy wheels that he checked his horse lest some too careless child
might be trodden on; and as he sat there, smiling out at them and
waiting for them to pass, suddenly above the tumult of voices with
their brotherliness he heard a sound that made him forget his
surroundings--forget human kinship--and think only of another kinship of
his to something secret and undeclared: in one of the tents a great
lonely beast lifted its voice and roared out its deep jungle-cry. The
primitive music rang above the civilized swarm like a battle-challenge
uttered from the heart of Nature--that sad long trumpet call of
instinct--caged and defrauded; a majestic despair for things within that
could never change and for things without that were never to be enjoyed.
Shallow and pitiable by comparison sounded the human voices about the
buggy wheels.
"_To make one outcry like that!--sincere, free! But to be heard
once--but to be understood at last!_" said the doctor.
When he reached the outskirts of the town, he met vehicles hurrying in
from the neighborhood and from far beyond it.
It was not long before he saw his own carriage approaching; and his
children, recognizing him, sprang to their feet and waved tumultuously.
As the vehicles drew alongside, he looked at them rather
absent-mindedly:--
"Where are you running off to?" he asked, pretending not to remember
that permission had been granted weeks before, as soon as the bills had
been pasted on turnpike fences.
"We're running off to the circus!"
"And what can you possibly be going to do at the circus? Children go to
a circus--who ever heard of such a thing! I should think you'd have
stayed at home and studied arithmetic or memorized the capitals of all
the States."
"Well, as for me," cried Elsie, "I'm pleased to explain what I shall do:
I shall drink lemonade and sit with the fat woman if there's room for
both of us on the same plank!"
"And what are _you_ going to do?"
"I'm going to do _everything_, of course! That's my ticket: I don't pay
for all and see some! I'm going to do everything."
"Everything is a good deal," commented the doctor introspectively.
"Everything is a good deal; but do what you can toward it--as you have
paid the price."
For a while he mused how childhood wants all of whatever it craves: its
desire is as single as its eye. Only later in life we come to know--or
had better know--that we may have the whole of very little: that a small
part of anything is our wisest portion, and the instant anything becomes
entirely ours, it becomes lost to us or we become lost to it: the bright
worlds that last for ages revolve--they do not collide.
He was still thinking of this when he met the carriage of Professor
Ousley; and the two middle-aged friends, who in their lives had never
passed each other on the road without stopping, stopped now. Professor
Ousley got out and came across to the doctor's buggy and greeted him
with fresh concerned cordiality.
"It has come at last," he announced, as though something long talked of
between them could be thus referred to; and he drew out a letter which
he handed in to be read; it was a call to a professorship in a Northern
university. As the doctor read it and reread it (continuing to read
because he did not know what to say)--as he thus read, he began to look
like a man grown ill.
"You have accepted, of course," he said barely.
"I have accepted."
The friends were silent with their faces turned in the same direction
across the country--their land, the land of generations of their people.
This breaking up would be the end for them of the near tie of soil and
tradition and boyhood friendship and the friendship of manhood.
"Well," said the doctor unsteadily, "this is what you have been working
for."
"This is what I have been working for," assented Professor Ousley.
These intermediate years had wrought their changes in him also; within
and without; he was grown heavy, and as an American scholar he had
weight. The doctor clung for safety to his one theme:--
"You have outgrown your place here in Kentucky. A larger world has heard
of you and sends for you because it needs you. Well done! But when I
became a Kentucky country doctor, it was for life. No greater world for
me! My only future is to try to do better the same work in the same
place--always better and better if possible till it is over. You climb
your mountain range; I stay in my valley."
Professor Ousley drew out another envelope:
"Read that," he said a little sadly, and sadness was rare with him: it
was an advertisement for the town paper announcing for sale his house
and farm.
"It is the beginning of the end," he said. "It is our farewell to
Kentucky, to you, to our past, but not, I hope, to our future. Herbert
and Elizabeth will have to be looked out for in the future: Elizabeth
may refuse to leave the neighborhood, who knows?" He laughed with
fatherly fondness and gentleness.
The doctor laughed with him: that plighting of their children!
At this moment a spring wagon came hastening on: it was the servants of
the Ousley household.
"So you have left your mistress by herself," the master called out to
them as they passed. They replied with their bashful hilarity that she
herself had sent them away, that she was glad to be well rid of them. As
the wagon regained the middle of the road and disappeared, Professor
Ousley looked at the doctor with a meaning that may have been deeper
than his smile:--
"She sent us away, too--me and the children. She wanted the day to
herself. Of course this change, the going away, the wrenching loose from
memories of life in the house there since our marriage--of course, all
that no other one of us can feel as she feels it. My work marches away,
I follow my work, she follows me, the children follow her. Duty heads
the procession. It pulls us all up by the roots and drags us in the
train of service: we are all servants, work is lord. I understood her
to-day--I was glad to bring the children and to be absent from her
myself: these hours of looking backward and of looking forward are
sacred to her--it is her woman's right to be alone." He drew the doctor
into these confidences as one not outside intimate sacred things. The
doctor made no reply.
He drove on now, not aware how he drove. A few more vehicles passed, and
then a mile or two farther out no more: they had ceased to come: he was
entering the silent open country.
A Kentucky landscape of August afternoon--Saturday afternoon! The
stillness! The dumb pathos of garnered fields--that spectacle of the
great earth dutiful to its trust and now discharged of obligation! That
acute pang of seeing with what loyalty the vows of the year have been
kept by soil and sun, and are ended and are now no more! The first
intimations also of changes soon to come--the chill of early autumn
nights when the moon rises on the white frost of fences and stubble, and
when outside windows glowing with kindled hearths the last roses freeze.
Of all seasons, of all the days with which nature can torture us, none
so wound without striking; none awaken such pain, such longing: all
desire offers itself to be harvested.
There was no glare of sunlight this afternoon, nor any shape of cloud,
but a haze which took away shadows from fences and bushes and wayside
trees and weeds, and left the earth and things on it in a radiance
between light and shadow--between day and darkness. It was a troubled
brooding: and when the surfaces are quiet, then begins the calling of
the deeps to the deeps.
As the doctor advanced into this stillness of the land, there reached
his ear, as one last reverberation, that long lonely roar of the great
animal homesick and life-sick for jungle and jungle freedom; for the
right to be what nature had made it--rebellious agony!
* * * * *
_A day to herself! She had sent them all away, husband, and children,
and servants! The right to be alone with memories ... under the still
surface the invitation of the deeps...._
* * * * *
Dr. Birney's buggy was nearing the front gate of Professor Ousley's
farm. When he reached it, he checked his horse and sat awhile. Then he
got out and looked up the pike and down the pike: it might have been an
instinct to hail any one passing--he looked dazed--like a man not
altogether under self-control. Not a soul was in sight.
He drove in.
The main driveway approached the house almost straight; but a few yards
inside the gate there branched from it another which led toward the
sequestered portions of the grounds. It was private and for pleasure: it
formed a feature of the landscape gardening of earlier times when
country places were surrounded by parklike lawns and forests and stone
fences. It skirted the grounds at a distance from the house, passed
completely round it, and returned to the main driveway at the point
where it started. Thus it lay about the house--a circle.
Slowly the doctor's buggy began to enclose the house within this circle,
this coil, this arm creeping around and enclosing a form.
In spots along the drive the shrubbery was dense, and forest trees
overhung. He had scarcely entered it when a bird flitted across his
path: softest of all creatures that move on wings, with its long gliding
flight, a silken voluptuous grace of movement--the rain-crow. It flew
before him a short distance and alighted on a low overhanging bough--its
breast turned, as waiting for him. Its wings during that flight
resembled the floating draperies of a woman fleeing with outstretched
arms; and as it now sat quiet and inviting, its throat looked like a
soft throat--bared.
Once the doctor's buggy passed a flower-bed the soil of which showed
signs of having been lately upturned: a woman's trowel lay on the edge
of the sod: some one had been working there; perhaps some deep
restlessness had ended the work. Here the atmosphere was sweet with rose
geranium and heliotrope: it was the remotest part of the ground,
screened from any distant view. And once the buggy curtains struck
against the spray of a rosebush and the petals fell on the empty cushion
beside the doctor and upon his knees. The horse moved so slowly along
this forest path of beauty and privacy that no ear could have heard its
approach as it passed round the house and returned to the main drive.
Here the doctor sat awhile.
Then he pulled the head of the horse toward the house.
He reached the top of the drive. At the end of a short pavement stood
the house. The front doors were closed--not locked. It stood there in
the security of its land and of its history, and of traditions and
ideals. Undefended except by these: with faith that nothing else could
so well defend.
On one side of the pavement was built an old-fashioned ornament of
Southern lawns--a vine-covered, rose-covered summer-house within which
could be seen rugs and chairs and a worktable: some one had been at
work; that same deep restlessness had perhaps terminated pastime here.
Near the other end of the house two glass doors, framed like windows,
opened upon a single stone step in the grass; and within these doors
hung a thin white drapery of summer curtains; and under the festoon of
these curtains there was visible from the doctor's buggy half the still
figure of a woman--reclining.
She had bespoken a day for solitude. And now she sat there, deep in the
reverie of the years.
* * * * *
Surely through that reverie ran the memory of a Christmas Eve when her
husband had brought her home with him, and, leading her to this same
bed-chamber, to a place under the chandelier from which mistletoe hung,
had taken her in his arms; and as his warm breath broke against her
face, his lips, hardly more than a youth's then, had uttered one
haunting phrase: _bride of the mistletoe_.
Now had come the year for the closing scene of youth's romance in the
house--a romance that already for years had been going its quiet way to
extinction. The shorn group of them were soon to pass out of it into a
vaster world: the young lover of the hearth had become the middle-aged
lover of humanity.
And through the reverie ran thoughts of the other man who had been near
during all this time--defrauded of her--his ideal; baffled in his
desire; a man with a love of her that had been a long prayer and a
madness: to whom she owed her life: this other man to be left behind
here amid the old familiar fields--with his love of her ruining his
home.
* * * * *
The doctor got out of his buggy noiselessly. He loosened the horse's
check-rein without knowing what he did; and the surprised animal turned
its head and touched him inquiringly in his side with its nose. He
thrust his forefinger down inside his collar and pulled it with the
gesture of a man who felt himself choking. He could not--for some
reason--hear his own feet on the pavement nor on the steps as he mounted
the porch. On one side in the shadow of old vines stood a settee with
cushions; and at the head of it a little table with books opened and
unopened: that same deep restlessness had ended reading. As he grasped
the knob of the bell, it slipped from his hand and there was a loud
clangor.
She stepped quickly out upon the stone before her door, and at
recognition of him, with a smile and gesture of welcome, she disappeared
within. The next moment the front door was opened wide; but at the sight
of his face--with an instinct perhaps the oldest that the race knows and
that needs never to be explained--she took one step backward. Then she
recovered herself, and, unsupported, she stood there on the threshold of
her home.
"_Water!_" His death-white lips framed the word without a sound.
He watched her pass quickly down the hall till she disappeared. Turning
away, he sat down beside the small table of books in the shadow of the
vines; and he fixed his blood-swollen eyes on the door, waiting for her
to return. She came unwaveringly, and without a word placed the glass of
water beside him, and then she passed out of sight behind him.
A long time he remained there. Close to his ear out of the depths of the
honeysuckle came the twittering of a brood of nestlings as the mother
went to and fro--a late brood, the first having met with tragedy, or the
second love-mating of the season.
Then upon the stillness another sound broke--a plain warning to his ear.
It was a scraping of the buggy wheel against the buggy, showing that his
horse, finding its check-rein loosened, but being too well trained to
move, had turned short to crop the grass beside the driveway.
How the homely things, the pitiable trifles reach us amid life's
immensities!
This overturning of a buggy! The overturning of lives!
He started down the steps, and then midway between the house and the
buggy he saw her.
She stood a few yards from him across the grass at one of the entrances
of the summer house where she had been working at her needlework. She
stood there, not waiting for him to come--but waiting for him to go. For
years he had followed her as along a path: this was the end of the path:
neither could go farther.
And now, turning at the end of the path, she meant to make him
understand--understand her better and understand himself better.
And so she stood there facing him, the whole glowing picture of her
wifehood and motherhood and womanhood: not in fear nor anger, nor with
any reproach for him nor any stain for herself: but with the deepest
understanding and sympathy in a great tragedy--and with her friendship.
Then she turned away and with quiet steps took a slender path which led
to those sequestered portions of the grounds where she had left her
trowel and geraniums and heliotropes. Slowly along this labyrinth of
verdure, under the branches of the old forest trees, she passed. Now a
shrub partly hid her: once the long bough of a rose tree touched her
shoulder and dropped the petals of its blossoms behind her. Farther
away, farther away, then lost down the dim glade.
* * * * *
The buggy crept homeward along the pike. The horse hung its head low;
the reins lay on the dashboard; with its obscure sense that something
was wrong it struck the gait with which it had always yielded obedience
to the sadnesses of the land--and moved along the highway as behind a
death.
Past farms of happy husbands and wives and children! Past fences on
which, a bareheaded boy, he had once liked to come out and sit and watch
people pass; or to meet his uncle as he returned home. Past the little
roadside church, its doors and windows so tightly shut now during the
week, where years before he had sat one morning and had shot the arrow
of a boy's satire at the Commandment for men only.
Two voices for him that day--the same two that are in every man, the
only two in any man: the cry of the jungle--I _will_--and the voice of
the mountain-top--
Thou Shalt Not.
V
EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE
FOUR months had elapsed since that August afternoon of summer heat and
passion--not a lengthy period as reckoned on the mere unemotional
calendar. But changes in our lives are not measurable by days: we may
spend eventless years with no inner or outer sign of growth, and then
some hour may bring a readjustment, an advancement, of our whole being.
The oriental story of Saul of Tarsus, made a changed man by a voice or a
vision of heavenly things, is human and natural, and for this reason if
for no other has been credible to thousands of men--this reversal of
direction on life's road.
As Dr. Birney now on the morning of this twenty-fourth of December sat
in his library, trying to make out the bills of the year, and there lay
disclosed before him the book of the years--the story of his life from
boyhood up--he by and by abandoned the filling out of blanks against his
professional neighbors and began to cast up as at the end of no previous
year his own human debt to the better ideals of his fellow-beings--and
to himself. And Nature, who was grievously in his debt but had no notion
of paying, Nature stood at his shoulder and pressed him for settlement
in that old formula of hers: you need not have opened this account with
Nature, but since it has been opened, there is no closing it. It runs
until you are declared bankrupt; and you are not bankrupt until you are
dead. Then of course as a business firm I shall lose what I have not
already collected from you; but there are enough others to keep the
concern prosperous and going. Meantime--make a partial payment _now_:
payment in suffering, payment in expiation, payment in self-repudiation.
If you have any funds invested in a habit of inferiority, they are
acceptable: I levy on them.
One particular fact this morning had riveted Dr. Birney's attention upon
the slow inexorable grinding of these mills of life.
For years the unhappiness of his domestic affairs--the withdrawal of his
wife from him under his roof--had by insensible stages travelled as a
story to all other homesteads in that region. In his own house it had
always remained a mute tragedy: each of the two who bore the yoke of it
made no willing sign; each turned toward their world the unbetraying
countenance. And it must be remembered that half a century ago and less
you might have journeyed inquisitively through the length and breadth of
that land and have found probably not one case of divorce nor of
separation without divorce: among that people marriage was truly for
better or for worse--a great binding and unalterable sacrament of
blended lives. If after marriage love's young dream ended, then you
lived on where you were--wide awake; if all gorgeous colors left the
clouds and the clouds left the sky, you stood the blistering sun; if it
turned out to be oil and water poured together, at least it was oil and
water within the same priceless cruet: and the perpetuity of the cruet
was considered of more value to society than the preservation of a
little oil and water.
No divorce then nor separation in his case; nor any voluntary
vulgarization of the truth, and yet a widely diffused knowledge of this
truth among neighbors, among his brother physicians, in county seats,
and away down on that lower level of the domestic servants, the proudest
experience of whose lives is perhaps the discovery of something to
criticise in those far above them: is it not a personal triumph to level
a pocket telescope on the sun?
And all this Dr. Birney had grown used to through Nature's kind
indurations: all of us have to grow used to so much; and perhaps there
is no surer test for any of us than how much we can bear. But in one of
life's directions only--in the direction of his children--his outlook
had hitherto been as refreshing to him as sunlight on the young April
verdure of the land. In that direction had still been left him complete
peace, because there still dwelt spotlessness.
But the father had long dreaded the arrival in his children of an age
when they must commence to see things in their home which they could not
understand or in fairness judge. He carried that old dread felt by so
many parents that by and by the children will be forced to
understand--and to misunderstand--the lack of something in the house. It
was for this very reason that permission had the more gladly been
granted them this year to celebrate their Christmas elsewhere; for this
festival brings into relief as nothing else the domestic peace of a
fireside or the discords that mar the lives of those gathered in
coldness about its warmth.
And now the long expected had arrived. His conversation with his little
boy that morning before the two children had darted off for their
Christmas away from home had brought the announcement: the boy was at
last mature enough to begin to put his own interpretation upon the
estrangement of his parents. Moreover, the son now believed that he had
found the father out, had penetrated to his secret; and the doctor
recalled the words which had conveyed this youthful judgment to him:--
"_If I should get tired of Elizabeth and wanted a little change and fell
in love with another man's wife--_"
There was the snow-white annunciation! There the doctor got insight into
the direction that a young life tended to take! There was the milestone
already reached by the traveller! That is, his son out of devotion to
him had already entered into a kind of partnership in his father's
marital unfaithfulness. The boy had laughed in his father's eyes with
elation at his own loyalty.
These tidings of degeneracy it was that so arrested the doctor on this
day. The influence of the house had at last reached the only remaining
field thus far unreached; and now the seeds of suggestion had been
dropped from one ripened life into new soil, sowing the world's harvest
over again--that old, old harvest--of tares and tears. Hitherto his
tragedy had been communicated to his own generation; now it had dropped
into the next generation: it had been sown past his own life futureward.
The shock of this discovery had befallen him just when Dr. Birney had
begun to extricate himself from his whole past; when he had begun to
hope that it might somehow begin to be effaced, sponged away.
For although but four months had passed from that August afternoon to
this December morning, a great change had been wrought in him.
When on the day following that sad August one he about the middle of the
forenoon had driven distractedly into Professor Ousley's yard, he saw
that friend of his youth, the man he loved best of men, the most nearly
perfect character he knew among men,--he saw him sitting on a rustic
bench under an old forest tree inside his front gate,--waiting for him.
Beside him on the bench lay papers over which he was working--not
because he enjoyed work at that moment probably, but because it was
impossible to sit there and wait with empty hands--with his mind
tortured by one thought, the sorrow and shame of this meeting.
As the doctor somehow got out of his buggy and started across the grass
toward him, he did not look up because he could not look up at once; and
he did not rise and come to meet him; it was impossible--for a moment.
But then with a high bracing of himself--he came. And coming, he showed
in his face only deep emotion, anxiety, distress, such as a true man
might feel for another true man who had been caught in one of life's
disasters. As a friend might walk toward a friend who from perfect
health had by some accident of machinery tottered to him mangled; or as
to a friend of wealth who through some false investment had by a turn of
fortune's wheel been left penniless; or as to a friend of sound eyesight
who had suddenly lost the power of right vision; or as to a friend who
travelling a straight road across a perilous country had by some atrophy
or lesion of the brain lost his bearings and was found wandering over a
precipice.
"How do you do, Downs?" he called out, using the old first name which
for years now he had dropped, the boyish name of complete boyish
friendship. "Come and sit down," he said, and he wound his arm through
the doctor's and all but supported him until they reached the seat under
the tree.
And then, without waiting or wavering or looking at his friend's face,
most of all without allowing him to utter a word (like a man aroused to
the battle of a whole life which concentrated itself then and there), he
turned to his papers and began to speak of the future--of the
professorship with its new work, new duties, new services--to the going
away from Kentucky: not once did he turn the talk away from the new, the
future, except that when he finished he covered the whole theme by
saying that the old ties must hold fast and become the dearer for the
separation. He wanted the doctor's advice, insisted upon having it,
forced him too on into this future. Not a word, not a look of the eye,
not a note in the voice, about a thing so near, too near.
"Now this is the end of that," he said, putting the papers away. "But it
all brings up something else: the farther we go forward, the longer we
look backward; and the future, this new future, has turned my eyes all
the more toward the past, Downs, our past--yours and mine!"
And so he began to talk about this past. He went back to their boyhood
together. He laughed over the time when he began to go to the manor
house every Saturday to stay all night. He declared that he had expected
the first time to starve in a house where there were no women; but to
his astonishment--and relief--he had found that he had devoured things
as never before. He had not been prepared to say--speaking for the boy
he then was--that a woman at the table took away his appetite; but there
was the fact, unquestionable and satisfying, that at the table with
males only he had discovered bodily abysses within himself that had
never been called into requisition! He was as frivolous as all this,
winding quietly along through those happy years.
He recalled another incident: that during one of their first rabbit
hunts they had fired almost simultaneously at the same rabbit. As
neither could claim the glory of killing it, they had decided that at
least they must share equally the glory of its pelt. And so, measuring
to an equal distance from the tip of its nose and the tip of its tail,
they had there inserted a penknife and severed the skin; and then,
propping their boots, soles against soles, like those resolved on a tug
of war, and each taking hold of his half of the skin, with one mighty
jerk backwards each was in possession of his trophy! He was as frivolous
as that. Nor would he ever leave this theme of their friendship, weaving
about it here and there remembered tricks and escapades as he traced it
down--this bond in their lives. (There were such friendships in those
days.)
And so he poured out a man's tribute to a man's friendship; and then
quickly with a change of tone by which we all may intimate to a visitor
that his visit is at an end, he bade the doctor take his leave. But he
did one thing first--one little thing:--
"Josephine sent you these, and told me to pin them on you, with her
love," he said with a tremor of the mouth, his eyes filling; and taking
from the lapel of his coat a little freshly plucked bunch of heliotrope
and rose geranium, he leaned affectionately over against the doctor's
shoulder and pinned the flowers on his breast.
Then he held out his hand as if to drag the doctor to his feet, walked
with him to the buggy, pushed him in, put the reins in his palm, and
gave a slap to the horse to start it.
"Come to see us, Downs," he said; "we can't have you much longer."
* * * * *
Truly if the rest of us had nobility enough to treat one another's
failings with sympathy and understanding, there would be few tragedies
for us in our human lives, except the inevitable tragedies of nature.
The way in which these two friends instead of turning away from him
instantly turned toward him, sparing not themselves that they might
rescue him from what now might swiftly and easily be utter ruin--this
most human touch of most human nobleness wrought in him a revelation and
a revolution.
On one day he had gone to the end of the long path of temptation: there
was relief in that even. And on the next what is finest in human nature
had come to his rescue. And both of these things changed him. Every day
since had been changing him. The unlifted shadow that had overlain the
landscape of his life had begun to break up into moving shadows
traversed by rifts of light: a ravishing greenness began to reappear in
the world. That old irremovable obstruction across his road had been
withdrawn: once again there was a clear path and single vision.
But the sower may become a new character; the growth of what he has
sowed must go on. And the doctor with a vision clarified and corrected
now saw thriving everywhere around him young plants the germs of which
he had so long been scattering. A farmer might from a field by dint of
infinite patience and searching recover every seed that he had thrown
forth; but as well might he try to gather back a shower of raindrops
from dry clods.
And as the doctor sat in his library that morning with this final
announcement to him of how things sown were growing in the nature of his
little boy, it seemed to him the moment to call upon Nature for a
settlement--Nature who never fails to collect a bill, but who never pays
one. And sitting there with the whole subject before him as a physician
studying his own case, he asked of Nature whether without any will of
his own she had not started him in life with too great susceptibility to
the power of suggestion. Far back when his character was being moulded,
had not Nature seen to it that wrong suggestions were sown in him? Had
not all his trouble started there? Was not _he_ harvesting what he had
not scattered? This immeasurable power of suggestion, this new mystery
which innumerable minds were now trying to fathom, to govern, to apply.
This fresh field of research for his own science of medicine--this
wounding and this healing, this waylaying and misleading, by suggestion.
This plan of Nature that no human being should escape it, that it should
be the very ether which all must breathe.
* * * * *
Meantime out of doors the face of Nature had rapidly changed; his
forecast of early morning had been fulfilled: the wind had died down,
clouds had overspread the sky, and it was snowing rapidly. On turnpike
and lane and crossroads there was falling the dry snow of true winter
when there is sleighing.
He had given up work and had long been walking restlessly to and fro
from one room to another; and now as he stood at a window and looked out
at the mantle of ermine being woven for all unsightly things, at the
hiding away of the year's blots and stains under the one new
spotlessness, his thoughts buried themselves with getting out his own
sleigh and with his trip across country in the afternoon to the homes of
the sick children. But more intimately he thought of the long drive
homeward from the distant county seat late that night--with his memories
of Christmas Eve.
He turned from the window, and going to his office set about the work of
mending the sleigh-bells. For some reason he did this most quietly lest
they should send any sound through the stillness of the house. Once as a
bell tumbled out of its place, instinctively he put his hand over it as
though it were human and he must silence its mouth of merriment.
Sleigh-bells seemed out of place in these rooms; they threw their music
into old wounds. When he had finished, he put them just inside the door
of the small room opening toward the stable where his man could take
them away without making any noise.
And now another sound caught the doctor's ear as he was washing his
hands.
It was half past twelve o'clock; and his wife had entered the
dining-room to begin some early preparations for dinner, and she was
alone. She wished no maid to-day, apparently, at least not yet; and as
she moved familiarly about there reached his ear--very low, sung wholly
to herself--the melody of a ballad.
The doctor knew it--words and music: it was the _Ballad of the Trees and
the Master_. In this the poet--a Southern poet who himself alike through
genius and suffering had entered while on earth into the divine--in this
the poet had represented the Son of Man as going into the woods when his
hour was near; into the woods for such strength as the forest only may
sometimes give us: the same forest out of which humanity itself had
emerged when it began its troubled history of search for the ideal.
Thus her song was not of the Christmas Tree and of the Manger when
Divine love arrives; but of the tree of the Crucifixion and of love's
betrayal and sacrifice ere it goes away. It was not the carol of the
whole happy world at this hour for Bethlehem, but the hymn of
Calvary--the music of the thorn tree and of the Crown of Thorns.
And this from his wife on Christmas Eve!--not for his ear: not for any
one's ear: but to herself alone.
As he listened, with an overmastering impulse he walked to the corner of
the library and stood before her picture. He noticed that in the
careless haste of holiday house-cleaning to-day the servant had left on
the glass of the frame some finger-prints, some particles of dust. He
brought a little moistened antiseptic sponge and a little red-cross
gauze, and softly cleaned it as though he were touching a wound. Then he
returned to the window and watched the snow falling and heard his wife's
song through to the end.
It was she to whom he owed everything. It was she who, a few years after
their marriage, having discovered herself to be an unloved bride, had
thrown her whole agonized nature into the one remaining chance of
winning his love as young wife and young mother. Having seen that hope
pass from her, she had withdrawn from one tragedy into a lesser one: she
had withdrawn from him. And so withdrawing, she held the whole power of
ruining him. Divorce--open separation--and his career as a physician in
that land would have been ended.
Instead, she too had come to his rescue. Slowly out of that too swift
and pitiless a fate for her own life, she had begun to work for the
success of his: it was of too much value to many to be brought to
nothingness for the disappointment of one.
The doctor stood there, looking out at the snowstorm and thinking how
all the people who could most have destroyed him had spared not
themselves to make him happy and successful and useful.
The dining-room doors were thrown open--he went in to dinner.