I
The first caprice of November snow had sketched the world in white for
an hour in the morning. After mid-day, the sun came out, the wind
turned warm, and the whiteness vanished from the landscape. By
evening, the low ridges and the long plain of New Jersey were rich and
sad again, in russet and dull crimson and old gold; for the foliage
still clung to the oaks and elms and birches, and the dying monarchy
of autumn retreated slowly before winter's cold republic.
In the old town of Calvinton, stretched along the highroad, the lamps
were lit early as the saffron sunset faded into humid night. A mist
rose from the long, wet street and the sodden lawns, muffling the
houses and the trees and the college towers with a double veil, under
which a pallid aureole encircled every light, while the moon above,
languid and tearful, waded slowly through the mounting fog. It was a
night of delay and expectation, a night of remembrance and mystery,
lonely and dim and full of strange, dull sounds.
In one of the smaller houses on the main street the light in the
window burned late. Leroy Carmichael was alone in his office reading
Balzac's story of "The Country Doctor." He was not a gloomy or
despondent person, but the spirit of the night had entered into him.
He had yielded himself, as young men of ardent temperament often do,
to the subduing magic of the fall. In his mind, as in the air, there
was a soft, clinging mist, and blurred lights of thought, and a still
foreboding of change. A sense of the vast tranquil movement of Nature,
of her sympathy and of her indifference, sank deeply into his heart.
For a time he realised that all things, and he, too, some day, must
grow old; and he felt the universal pathos of it more sensitively,
perhaps, than he would ever feel it again.
If you had told Carmichael that this was what he was thinking about as
he sat in his bachelor quarters on that November night, he would have
stared at you and then laughed.
"Nonsense," he would have answered, cheerfully. "I'm no
sentimentalist: only a bit tired by a hard afternoon's work and a
rough ride home. Then, Balzac always depresses me a little. The next
time I'll take some quinine and Dumas: he is a tonic."
But, in fact, no one came in to interrupt his musings and rouse him to
that air of cheerfulness with which he always faced the world, and to
which, indeed (though he did not know it), he owed some measure of his
delay in winning the confidence of Calvinton.
He had come there some five years ago with a particularly good outfit
to practice medicine in that quaint and alluring old burgh, full of
antique hand-made furniture and traditions. He had not only been well
trained for his profession in the best medical school and hospital of
New York, but he was also a graduate of Calvinton College (in which
his father had been a professor for a time), and his granduncle was a
Grubb, a name high in the Golden Book of Calvintonian aristocracy and
inscribed upon tombstones in every village within a radius of fifteen
miles. Consequently the young doctor arrived well accredited, and was
received in his first year with many tokens of hospitality in the
shape of tea-parties and suppers.
But the final and esoteric approval of Calvinton was a thing apart
from these mere fashionable courtesies and worldly amenities--a thing
not to be bestowed without due consideration and satisfactory reasons.
Leroy Carmichael failed, somehow or other, to come up to the
requirements for a leading physician in such a conservative community.
In the judgment of Calvinton he was a clever young man; but he lacked
poise and gravity. He walked too lightly along the streets, swinging
his stick, and greeting his acquaintances blithely, as if he were
rather glad to be alive. Now this is a sentiment, if you analyse it,
near akin to vanity, and, therefore, to be discountenanced in your
neighbour and concealed in yourself. How can a man be glad that he is
alive, and frankly show it, without a touch of conceit and a
reprehensible forgetfulness of the presence of original sin even in
the best families? The manners of a professional man, above all,
should at once express and impose humility.
Young Dr. Carmichael, Calvinton said, had been spoiled by his life in
New York. It had made him too gay, light-hearted, almost frivolous. It
was possible that he might know a good deal about medicine, though
doubtless that had been exaggerated; but it was certain that his
temperament needed chastening before he could win the kind of
confidence that Calvinton had given to the venerable Dr. Coffin, whose
face was like a monument, and whose practice rested upon the two
pillars of podophyllin and predestination.
So Carmichael still felt, after his five years' work, that he was an
outsider; felt it rather more indeed than when he had first come. He
had enough practice to keep him in good health and spirits. But his
patients were along the side streets and in the smaller houses and out
in the country. He was not called, except in a chance emergency, to
the big houses with the white pillars. The inner circle had not yet
taken him in.
He wondered how long he would have to work and wait for that. He knew
that things in Calvinton moved slowly; but he knew also that its
silent and subconscious judgments sometimes crystallised with
incredible rapidity and hardness. Was it possible that he was already
classified in the group that came near but did not enter, an
inhabitant but not a real burgher, a half-way citizen and a lifelong
new-comer? That would be rough; he would not like growing old in that
way.
But perhaps there was no such invisible barrier hemming in his path.
Perhaps it was only the naturally slow movement of things that
hindered him. Some day the gate would open. He would be called in
behind those white pillars into the world of which his father had
often told him stories and traditions. There he would prove his skill
and his worth. He would make himself useful and trusted by his work.
Then he could marry the girl he loved, and win a firm place and a real
home in the old town whose strange charm held him so strongly even in
the vague sadness of this autumnal night.
He turned again from these musings to his Balzac, and read the
wonderful pages in which Benassis tells the story of his consecration
to his profession and Captain Genestas confides the little Adrien to
his care, and then the beautiful letter in which the boy describes the
country doctor's death and burial. The simple pathos of it went home
to Carmichael's heart.
"It is a fine life, after all," said he to himself, as he shut the
book at midnight and laid down his pipe. "No man has a better chance
than a doctor to come close to the real thing. Human nature is his
patient, and each case is a symptom. It's worth while to work for the
sake of getting nearer to the reality and doing some definite good by
the way. I'm glad that this isn't one of those mystical towns where
Christian Science and Buddhism and all sorts of vagaries flourish.
Calvinton may be difficult, but it's not obscure. And some day I'll
feel its pulse and get at the heart of it."
The silence of the little office was snapped by the nervous clamour of
the electric bell, shrilling with a night call.