Unnoticed by Mrs. Guthrie and her two boys, there was something more
than a little pathetic in the Doctor's eager, wistful attitude toward
the rather thoughtless, high-spirited, seething youth in the middle of
which he found himself for the first time.
This man had never been young. The atmosphere of the farm on which he
had been born killed youth as foul air kills a caged bird. Poverty,
sordidness and the grim, constant struggle to live made his childhood
and early days utterly devoid of the good sweet things. His mother, worn
out and dispirited, died in giving him birth, and his father, bitter,
lonely and filled with the irony that comes from a long and unprofitable
hand-to-hand fight with mother-earth, let him bring himself up. He was
turned out to work at a time when most lads are sent to school. He had
to trudge daily into the straggling, one-eyed town, at an early hour, to
report at the chemist's store where he obtained employment as an errand
boy. Most of the small wages he earned were required by his father. From
almost the very beginning life was to him a sort of whirling stream into
which he had been flung before having been taught to swim. Mere
self-preservation demanded that he should keep himself afloat. He picked
up education as a stray dog picks up an occasional bone. There was,
however, great grit in this boy and deep down in his soul an ambition to
become something better than his father, whose daily wrestle with
nature--the most relentless of task-mistresses--had warped his character
and stultified his soul. Young Hunter shuddered at the thought of living
always on the farm, of grubbing in the earth, of planting and hoeing and
reaping, of facing the almost inevitable tragedy of spoiled crops and
ruined hopes, and the yearly set-backs of advancing freights and higher
wages. He looked with growing horror and detestation at the farm
implements among which his father spent his life; and while he ran his
errands, carrying medicines and soda syphons, he nursed a dream in his
little cold heart, which grew out of the smell of medicines and the talk
of illness that was all about him in the chemist store. It was to become
a doctor and tend the needs of humanity and, if it was in his power, to
save to other children the mothers who brought them into being.
No wonder Dr. Hunter Guthrie wore strong glasses over his short-sighted
eyes. At all times, with a sort of greed and an almost terrible
eagerness, he read every medical book on which he could lay his
hands,--in bed by the light of one candle, in the cubby-hole at the back
of the store under the glare of the unshaded electric bulb, in
trolley-cars and trains, and on the stoop of the shabby farmhouse so
long as the light lasted. Later, after his day's work, he attended night
classes, and even as he walked from the farm to the town he read.
Spending sleepless nights and living laborious days he followed the
example of many other brave and determined boys whose names gleam like
beacons in the history of their country. He worked his way through the
necessary stages until finally, after a struggle so relentless that it
nearly broke his health, he became a qualified doctor. In order to earn
the money for his courses he was at different times bell-boy in a
country hotel, an advertisement writer in a manufacturer's office, a
clerk for a real-estate man and a traveling salesman for safety razors.
His vacations were more arduous than his terms, and during these he
earned the money with which to pay his college expenses. Every step up
the ladder of innumerable rungs--which sometimes seemed to him
impossible to climb--was painful and difficult. So much concentration
was needed from the very beginning--so much condensed determination and
energy required--that at the age of twenty-five he seemed to have lived
twice that number of years. No wonder then that the all-conquering
youthfulness of all the undergraduates amongst whom he found himself at
Oxford awoke a sort of envy in his heart and startled him who had never
been young. There was no meanness, jealousy or sense of martyrism in his
feelings as he watched the kaleidoscopic picture of university
life--only a sort of wonder and amazement that there were men in the
world so lucky--so indescribably fortunate as to be able to carry
boyhood and all its joys forward to an age when he had forgotten that
such a period existed. Many times during those interesting and stirring
days he stopped suddenly and thanked his God that he had been able to do
for his own boys those things which no one had ever done for him, and
give them such a chance in life as he had never had. Actually to see
Peter, his eldest boy, proving his muscular strength and his mental
ability and moving among his fellows with such splendid popularity,
filled him with pride and gladness. Here indeed was a very concrete
evidence of his reward for that long, arduous struggle.
Like most men who have concentrated upon one thing, Dr. Guthrie was a
child when it came to others. Athleticism, of which he knew nothing,
filled him with admiration. The knack of conversation amazed him. Even
to his wife he found it difficult to talk. To force himself to confide
was almost impossible--it was like blasting a rock. One afternoon
however he got nearer to an intimate expression of his feelings than
ever before--perhaps because he was still under the influence of the
intoxication of the youthfulness all about him.
Kenyon had driven them out after tea to Shotover Hill. All the young
people had gone on to Cuddesden, leaving the doctor and his wife to sit
and look down into the valley far below in which nestled the town and
all its colleges and spires. It had been a golden day and the sun was
setting with all the dignity and pomp of early summer, making the thin
line of the Thames shine like a winding silver ribbon. There was
something of exultation over the earth that evening and of
untranslatable beauty, and the evening song of the birds was like that
of choristers in a great cathedral.
Unusual words seethed in the doctor's head. He was moved and thrilled.
The rest and the relief of leaving his work, all the bustle and stir of
the new life in which he was a temporary figure, seemed to take him
back to his own early days when, with the little woman who sat by his
side, he had stood with her in their first house, newly married.
He took his hat off, put his arm round the shoulders of that faithful
woman and kissed her cheek with a touch of passion and gratitude. "My
darling," he said, "I wish I could say properly some of the things that
I feel about you and my children and the goodness of God. There are
tears in my heart, and strange feelings. I feel oddly young and strong.
I want to laugh and cry. I'd like to pick wild flowers and make a little
crown for your head. Don't laugh at me--please don't laugh."
The little woman took his thin hand and pressed it to her cheek. "I
laugh because that is how I feel, too," she said,--"young and glad and
very happy to see my big Peter doing such wonderful things, and still a
boy. Dear old man, we have much to be thankful for! I know how you've
worked and striven,--and how fine it is to see some of the results of
it. I was a little afraid before we came here that we might find Peter
different--altered--perhaps older--but he's just the same. He's exactly
like you."
The Doctor shook his head and a sudden pain twisted his thin, studious
face. "Oh no, no," he said, "I was never like that. I wish to God I had
been. But it was to make Peter what he is that I've worked night and
day. He's my idea of a man. He's doing all the things that I'd like to
have done. He's me as I might have been if I'd had any luck--any sort
of a chance. Do I regret it? Am I jealous? No; because if I hadn't
lived such an opposite life I mightn't have desired to give my boy all
this." He waved his hand towards the spires that rose in all their
significance out of the town away below. And then, with intense
eagerness and a ring of wistfulness in his voice that brought tears to
his wife's eyes, he bent towards her. "Do you think he realizes this,
Mary? Does Graham ever stop to think how hard I've worked to put him in
Wall Street? Does Belle ever wonder what it's cost me in youth and
health to give her so much more than she needs? I'm--I'm a queer,
wordless, foolishly shy man. Old since the time they all three began to
think and use their eyes,--necessarily concentrated and aloof away in
that laboratory of mine, and--and sometimes I wonder whether my children
know me and understand and make allowances. Do they, Mary, my dear one?
Do they?"
"Yes, my man, my brave and splendid man," she replied, "they do, they
do!" And in saying this she deliberately lied,--out of her great and
steadfast love for this man of hers she lied.
No one knew so well as she did that the father of her children might
almost as well be a mere distant relation who lived in their home for
reasons of convenience and allotted money to their requirements at the
proper time. No one knew so well as she did that Hunter Guthrie's tragic
lack of childhood had dried out of his nature the power of understanding
children. Never having been a child in any sense of the word--never
having known the inexpressible joy of a mother's love--remembering
nothing but a father who was either working hard or tired out--he was
unable to conceive what his own children needed in addition to all that
they got hourly from his wife and from his own work. It had always
seemed to him that in the possession of a mother they had everything
good that God could give them. It seemed to him that his own part was
performed by providing for their needs. No man desired to be the father
of sons and daughters more than he did. No man was prouder in the
possession of them than he was and had always been. To hear the patter
of their little feet about his house sent him to his work with that
sense of religion of which Carlyle wrote. To watch them shaping from
childhood into youth was the most satisfactory and beautiful thing in
his life. To be able, year after year, to do better and still better for
them was his best and biggest reward--far greater and more glorious than
the distinction he earned for himself and the international reputation
that increased with each of his discoveries. And when, six months after
Peter had left home to go to Oxford with a Rhodes scholarship, he found
himself unexpectedly endowed to the extent of over three million dollars
under the will of a late wealthy patient, so that he might, in the old
man's own words, "devote himself, without the fret and fever of earning
a livelihood as a practitioner, to the noble and limitless work of a
bacteriologist for the benefit of suffering humanity all over the
world," it was for the sake of his children that he offered up thanks.
With what immense pride he notified the authorities at Harvard that his
son was independent of the scholarship, which was free to send another
man to Oxford. With what keen pleasure he was able to buy Graham a seat
on the Stock Exchange, bring Belle out as a debutante and send his
little Ethel to the best possible school. These things he could do, and
did, but he could not and had never been able to do for them a better
thing than all these,--win their confidence, their deep affection and
their friendship. That gift had been killed in him. It could not be
acquired, taught or purchased, and he had always been as much out of
touch with his boys and girls as though he were divided from them by a
great stone wall. It had always been with them, "Look out! Here's
father!" instead of "Hello! Here's Dad!" His entrance into their
playroom was the signal for silence. The sight of his studious face and
short-sighted eyes and distrait, shy manner chilled them and reduced
them to quietude and self-consciousness and suspicion. If he had treated
them always as human beings, played with them, sat on the floor and
built houses with their bricks, thrown open the door of his study to
them, if only for half an hour every day, so that there might be no
possibility of its becoming a Blue Room; if he had, as they grew into
the habit of thinking and observing and remembering, told them about
himself and his own boyhood and in this way inculcated a mutual
interest, a desire to respond and open out; if, before the two boys had
gone to college he had had the courage to act on the earnest advice of a
friend and speak to them on the vital question of sex, give them the
truth as he so well knew it and warn them bravely and rightly of the
inevitable pitfalls that lined their youthful path, no brick wall would
have existed and he would have been their pal as well as their
father,--a combination altogether irresistible.
As it was Hunter Guthrie's wife, who loved him deeply and devotedly and
recognized in him a great man as well as a most unselfish father, was
obliged to lie in reply to his questions. She would rather have died,
then and there, than hurt him and bring down his house about his ears.
The sad and tragic part of it all was that she knew utterly that no
good, no change could be brought about by telling the truth. It was too
late.