The chatter was persistent. A hand was stretched up, and it took hold of his chin and shook it: —
"There ought to be a country where nobody suffers and there ought to be a time; a large country and a long time."
"There is such a country and there is such a time, Herbert," said the doctor, now with some sadness.
"Then I'll warrant you it's part of the United States," cried the boy, getting his idea of mortality slightly mixed with his early Americanism. "Texas would hold them, wouldn't it? Don't you think Texas could contain them all and contain them forever?"
The doctor laughed and seemed to think enough had been said on the subject of large enough graveyards for the race.
"Why don't you doctors send your patients to that country?"
"Perhaps we do sometimes!" The doctor laughed again.
"Do you ever send yours?"
"Possibly."
"And how many do you send?"
"I don't know!" exclaimed the doctor, laughing this time without being wholly amused. "I don't know, and I never intend to try to find out."
"When I grow up we'll practise together and send twice as many," the boy said, looking into his father's eyes with the flattery of professional imitation.
"So we will! There'll be no trouble about that! Twice as many, perhaps three times! No trouble whatever!"
He took the hands from his shoulders and laid them in the palm of his and studied them – those masculine boyish hands that had never touched any of the world's suffering. And then he looked at his own hands which had handled so much of the world's suffering, but had never reached happiness; happiness which for years had dwelt just at his finger-tips but beyond arm's reach.
Not very long afterwards another conversation lettered another mile-stone in the progress of mutual understanding.
It was a beautiful drowsy May morning near noon, and the two were driving slowly homeward along the turnpike. When the lazily trotting horse reached the front gate of a certain homestead, he stopped and threw one ear backward as a living interrogation point. As his answer, he got an unexpected cut in the flank with the tip of the lash that was like the sting of a hornet: a reminder that the driver was not alone in the buggy; that the horse should have known he was not alone; and that what he did when alone was a matter of confidence between master and beast.
The boy, who had been thrown backward, heels high, laughed as he settled himself again on his cushion: —
"He thought you wanted to turn in."
"He thinks too much – sometimes."
"Don't they ever get sick there?"
"I suppose they do."
"Then you turn in!"
"Then I don't turn in."
"Aren't you their doctor?"
"I was the doctor once."
"Where was I?"
"I don't know where you were; you were not born."
"So many things happened before I was born; I wish they hadn't!"
"It is a pity; I had the same experience."
The buggy rolled slowly along homeward. On one side of the road were fields of young Indian corn, the swordlike blades flashing in the sun; on the other side fields of red clover blooming; the fragrance was wafted over the fence to the buggy. Further, in a soft grassy lawn, on a little knoll shaded by a white ash, a group of sleek cattle stood content in their blameless world. Over the prostrate cows one lordly head, its incurved horns deep hidden by its curls, kept guard. The scene was a living Kentucky replica of Paul Potter's Bull.
"Drive!" murmured the doctor, handing over the reins; and he drew his hat low over his eyes and set his shoulder against his corner of the buggy; he often caught up with sleep while on the road. And he often tried to catch up with thinking.
The horse always knew when the reins changed hands. He disregarded the proxy, kept his own gait, picked the best of the road, and turned out for passing vehicles. The boy now grasped the lines with unexpected positiveness; and he leaned over and looked up under the rim of his father's hat: —
"I hope the doctor they employ will give them the wrong medicines," he confided. "I hope the last one of them will have many a rattling good bellyache for their meanness to you!"
Then more years for father and son, each finding the other out.
And now finally on the morning of that twenty-fourth day of December, the father was to witness a scene in the drama of his life as amazingly performed by his son – illustrating what a little actor can do when he undertakes to imitate an old actor to whom he is most loyal.
That morning after breakfast the apt pupil in Life's School had been sent for, and when he had entered the library, his father was sitting before the fire, idle. The buggy was not waiting outside; the hat and overcoat and gloves were nowhere in sight; and he had not gotten ready his satchel which took the place of the saddlebags of earlier generations when the country doctor travelled around on horseback and carried the honey of physic packed at his thighs – like a wingless, befattened bumblebee. This morning it looked as though all the sick were well at last; it was a sound if wicked world; and nothing was left for a physician but to be happy in it – without a profession – and without wickedness.
He threw himself into his father's impulsively opened arms, and was heaved high into his lap. Though he was growing rather mature for laps now; he was beginning to speculate about having something of a lap of his own; quite a good deal of a lap.
"How is the children's epidemic to-day?"
"Never you mind about the children's epidemic! I'll take care of the children's epidemic," repeated the doctor, pulling the long-faced, autumn-faced prodigy of all questions between his knees and looking him over with secret solicitude. "We'll not talk about sick children, but about two well children – thanked be the Father of all children! So you and Elsie are going away to help celebrate a Christmas Tree."
"Yes; but when are you going to have a Christmas Tree of our own?"
Now, that subject had two prongs, and the doctor seized the prong that did not pierce family affairs – did not pierce him. He settled down to the subject with splendid warmth and heartiness: —
"Well, let me see! You may have your first Christmas Tree as soon as you are old enough to commence to do things for other people; as soon as you can receive into your head the smallest hard pill of an idea about your duty to millions and millions and millions of your fellow medicine takers. Can you understand that?"
"Gracious! That would be a big pill – larger than my head! I don't see what it has to do with one miserable little dead pine tree!"
The doctor roared.
"It has this to do with one miserable dead pine tree: don't you know yet that Christmas Trees are in memory of a boy who was once exactly your age and height – and perhaps with your appetite – and with just as many eyes and possibly even more questions? The boy grew up to be a man. The man became a teacher. The teacher became a neighborhood doctor. The neighborhood doctor became the greatest physician of the world – and he never took a fee!"
"Ah, yes! But he wasn't a better doctor than you are, was he? If he'd come into this neighborhood and tried to practise, you'd soon have ousted him, wouldn't you, with your doses and soups and jellies?"
"Humph!" grunted the doctor with a wry twist of the mouth; "I suppose I would! Yes; undoubtedly I'd have ousted him! He could never have competed with me in my practice; never! But we won't try that hard little pill of an idea any more. We'll drop the subject of Christmas Trees for one more year. Perhaps by that time you can take the pill as a powder! So! I hear you are going to attend a dancing party; we'll talk about the party. And you are going over there to stay all night. I wish I were going. I wish I were going over there to stay all night," reiterated the man, with an outrush of solemn tenderness that reached back through vain years, through so many parched, unfilled years.
"I wish so, too," cried the boy, instantly burying his face on his father's coat-sleeve, then lifting it again and looking at him with a guilty flush which the doctor did not observe.
"Oh, do you! We won't say anything more about that, though I'm glad you'd like to have me along. Now then; go and have a good time! And take long steps and large mouthfuls! And you might do well to remember that a boy's stomach is not a birdnest to be lined with candy eggs."
"I think candy eggs would make a very good lining, better than real eggs; and about half the time you're trying to line me with them, aren't you? With all the sulphur in them! And I do hate sulphur, and I have always hated it since the boy at my desk in school wore a bag of it around his neck under his shirt to keep off diseases. My! how he smelt – worse than contagion! Candy eggs would make a very good lining; even the regular soldiers get candy in their rations now. And they don't have to eat new-laid eggs of mornings! Think of an army having to win a hard-fought battle on soft-boiled eggs! They don't have to do that, do they?"
"They do not!" said the doctor. "They positively do not! But we won't say anything more about eggs – saccharine or sulphurous. What are you going to do at the party?"
"I am going to dance."
"Alone? O dear! All alone? You'd better go skate on the ice! Not all alone?"
"I should say not! With my girl, of course."
"That's better, much better. And then what?"
"I am going to promenade, with my girl on my arm."
"On both arms, did you say?"
"No; on one arm."
"Which?"
"Either."
"That sounds natural! (Heart action regular; brain unclouded; temperature normal.) And then? What next?"
"I'm going to take the darling in to supper."
"Hold on! Not so fast! Suppose there isn't any supper – for the darling."
"Don't say that! It would nearly kill me! Don't you suppose there'll be any supper?"
"I'm afraid there will be. Well, after the darling has had her fatal supper? (Of course you won't want any!) What then?"
"What else is there to do?"
"You don't look as innocent as you imagine!"
"You don't have to confess what you'd like to do, do you? Would you have told your father?"
"I don't think I would."
"Then I won't tell you."
"Then you needn't! I don't wish to know – only it must not be on the cheek! Remember, you are no son of mine if it's on the cheek!"
"I thought I heard you say that got people into trouble."
"Maybe I did. I ought to have said it if I didn't; and it seems to be the kind of trouble that you are trying to get into. (Temperature rising but still normal. Respiration deeper. All symptoms favorable. No further bulletins deemed necessary.) Well, then? Where were we?"
"Anyhow, I've never thought of cheeks when I've thought of that; I thought cheeks were for chewing."
"Guardian Powers of our erring reason! Where did you get that idea – if sanity can call it an idea?"
"Watching our cows."
The doctor laughed till tears ran down his face.
"You can't learn much about kissing by watching anybody's cows, Governor," he said, wiping the tears away. "Not about human kissing. You must begin to direct your attention to an animal not so meek and drivable. You must learn to consider, my son, that hornless wonder and terror of the world who forever grazes but never ruminates!"
For years, in talking with a mind too young wholly to understand, he had enjoyed the play of his own mind. He knew only too well that there are few or none with whom a physician may dare have his sportive fling at his fellow-creatures, at life in general. From a listener who never sat in harsh judgment and who would never miscarry his random words, he had upon occasion derived incalculable relief.
"Anyhow, I have learned that cows have the new American way of chewing; so they never get indigestion, do they?"
"If they do, they cannot voice their symptoms in my mummied ears," said the doctor, who often seemed to himself to have been listening to hue and cry for medicine since the days of Thotmes. "However, we won't say anything further about that! What else are you going to do over there? This can't possibly be all!"
"To-night we children are going to sit up until midnight, to see whether the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise on Christmas Eve. We know they don't, but we're going to prove they don't!"
"Where did you pick up that notion?"
"Where did you pick it up when you were a boy?"
"I fail to remember," admitted the doctor with mock dignity, damaged in his logic but recalling the child legend that on the Night of the Nativity universal nature was in sympathy with the miracle. All sentient creatures were wakeful and stirring, and sent forth the chorus of their cries in stables and barns – paying their tribute to the Divine in the Manger and proclaiming their brotherhood with Him who was to bring into the world a new gospel for them also.
"I don't know where I got that," he repeated. "Well, after the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise, then what?"
"There isn't but one thing more; but that is best of all!"
"You don't say! Out with it!"
"That is our secret."
The new decision of tone demonstrated that another stage had been reached in their intercourse. The boy had withdrawn his confidence; he had entered the ranks of his own generation and had taken his confidence with him. Personally, also, he had shut the gate of his mind and the gate was guarded by a will; henceforth it was to be opened by permission of the guard. Something in their lives was abruptly ended; the father felt like ending the talk.
"Very well, then; we won't say anything more about the secret. And now you had better run along."
"But I don't want to run along just yet. It will be a long time before I see you again; have you thought of that?"
He reversed his position so as to face the fire; and he crossed his feet out beyond the promontory of the doctor's knees and folded his arms on the rampart of those enfolding arms.
For a few moments there was intimate silence. Then he inquired: —
"How old must a boy be to ask a girl?"
A flame more tender and humorous burned in the doctor's eyes.
"Ask her what?"
"Ask her nothing! Ask her!"
"You mean tell her, don't you? Not ask her, my friend and relative; tell her!"
"Well, ask her and tell her, too; they go together!"
"Is it possible! I'm always glad to learn!"
"Then, how old must he be?"
"Well, if you stand in need of the opinion of an experienced physician, as soon as he learns to speak would be about the right period! That would be the safest age! The patient would then have leisure to consider his case before being affected by the disease. You could have time to get singed and step away gradually instead of being roasted alive all at once. Does that sound hard?"
"Not very! Do you love a girl longer if you tell her or if you don't tell her?"
"I'm afraid nobody has ever tried both ways! Suppose you try both, and let us have the benefit of your experience."
"Well, then, if you love, do you love forever?"
The doctor laughed nervously and tightened his arms around the innocent.
"Nobody has lived forever yet – nobody knows!"
"But forever while you live – do you love as long as that?"
"You wouldn't know until you were dead and then it would be too late to report. But aren't you doing a good deal of hard fighting this morning, – on soft-boiled eggs, – though I think the victory is yours, General, the victory is truly and honestly yours!"
"I can't stop thinking, can I? You don't expect me to stop thinking, do you, when I'm just beginning really to think?"
"Very well, then, we won't say anything more about thinking."
"Then do you or don't you?"
"Now, what are you trying to talk about?" demanded the doctor angrily, and as if on instant guard. A new hatred seemed coming to life in him; there was a burning flash of it in his eyes.
"Just between ourselves – suppose that when I am a man and after I have been married to Elizabeth awhile, I get tired of her and want a little change. And I fell in love with another man's wife and dared not tell her, because if I did I might get a bullet through me; would I love the other man's wife more because I could not tell her, or would I love her more because I told her and risked the bullet?"
Pall-like silence draped the room, thick, awful silence. The father lifted his son from his lap to the floor, and turned him squarely around and looked him in the eyes imperiously. Many a time with some such screened but piercing power he, as a doctor, had scrutinized the faces of children to see whether they were aware that some vast tragedy of life was in the room with them. To keep them from knowing had often been his main care; seeing them know had been life's last pity; young children finding out the tragedies of their parents with one another – so many kinds of tragedies.
"You had better go now," he urged gently. Then an idea clamped his brain in its vise.
"And remember: while you are over there, you must try to behave with your best manners because you are going to stay in the house of a great lady. All the questions that you want to ask, ask me when you come back. Ask me!"
The boy standing before his father said with a strange quietness and stubbornness, probing him deeply through the eyes: —
"You haven't answered my last question yet, have you?"
"Not yet," said the doctor, with strange quietness also.
The boy had never before heard that tone from his father.
"It's sad being a doctor, isn't it?" he suggested, studying his father's expression.
"What do you know about sad? Who told you anything about sad?" muttered the doctor with new sadness now added to old sadness.
"Nobody had to tell me! I knew without being told."
"Run along now."
"Now I'll walk along, but I won't run along. I'll walk away from you, but I won't run away from you."
He wandered across the room, and stood with his hand reluctantly turning the knob. Then with a long, silent look at his father – he closed the door between them.
III
THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Dr. Birney stood motionless in the middle of the room with his gaze riveted on the door through which his son had lingeringly disappeared.
Some one of the world's greatest painters, chancing to enter, might worthily have desired to paint him – putting no questions as to who the man was or what he was; or what darkening or brightening history stretched behind him; or what entanglement of right and wrong lay around and within: painting only the unmistakable human signs he witnessed, and leaving his portrait for thousands of people to look at afterwards and make out of it what they could – through kinship with the good and evil in themselves: Velasquez, with his brush moving upon those areas of lonely struggle which sometimes lie with their wrecks at the bottom of the sea of human eyes; Franz Hals, fixing the cares which hover too long around our mouths; Vandyck, sitting in the shadow of the mystery that slants across all mortal shoulders; Rembrandt, drawn apart into the dignity that invests colossal disappointment. Any merciless, masterful limner of them all in a mood to portray those secret passions which drive men, especially men of middle age, towards safer deeps upon the rocks.
He had a well-set soldierly figure and the swarthy roughened face that results from years of exposure to weather – a face looking as if inwardly scarred by the tempests of his character but unwrinkled by the outer years. Both face and figure breathed the silent impassiveness of the regular who has been through campaigns enough already but is enlisted for life and for whatsoever duty may bring; he standing there in some wise palpably draped in the ideals of his profession as the soldier keeps his standard waving high somewhere near his tent, to remind him of the greatness that he guards and of the greatness that guards him.
Not a tall man as men grow on that Kentucky plateau; and looking less than his stature by reason of being so strongly built, square-standing, ponderous; his muscles here and there perceivable under his loosely fitting sack-suit of dark-gray tweeds; so that out of respect for strength which is both manhood and manliness, your eye travelled approvingly over his proportions: measuring the heavy legs down to the boots; the heavy arms out to the wrists; the heavy square thick muscular warm hands; and the heavy torso up to the short neck rising full out of a low turned-down collar.
In this neck an animal wildness and virile ferocity – not subdued, not stamped out, partly tamed by a will. Overtopping this neck a tremendous head covered with short glossy black hair, curling blue-black hair. In this head a powerful blunt nose, set like the muzzle of a big gun pointed to fire a heavy projectile at a distant target – the nose of a never-releasing tenacity. Above this nose, right and left, thick black brows, the bars of nature's iron purpose. Under these brows wonderful grayish eyes with glints of Scotch blue in them or of Irish blue or of Saxon blue; for the blood of three races ran thick in his veins and mingled in the confusions of his character: blue that was in the eyes of earlier Scottish men, exulting in heather and highland stag; or the blue of other eyes that had looked meltingly on golden-haired minstrel and gold-framed harp – eyes that might have poured their love into Isolde's or have faded out in the death of Tristan; or the blue of still other eyes – archers who had shot their last arrows and, dying, drew themselves to the feet of Harold, their blue-eyed king fighting for Saxon England's right and might.
They were eyes that could look you to the core with intelligence and then rest upon you from the outside with sympathy for all that he had seen to be human in you whether of strength or of weakness – but never of meanness. Under the blunt nose a thick stubby mustache trimmed short, leaving exposed the whole red mouth – the mouth of great passions – no paltry passions – none despicable or contemptible.
On the whole a man who advances upon you with all there is in him and without waiting for you to advance upon him; no stepping aside for people in this world by this man, nor stepping timidly over things. Even as he stood there a motionless figure, he diffused an influence most warm and human, gay and tragic, irresistible. A man loved secretly or openly by many women. A man that men were glad to come to confide in, when they crossed the frontiers of what Balzac, speaking of the soldiers of Napoleon, called their miserable joys and joyous miseries.
But assuredly not a man to be put together by piecemeal description such as this: the very secret of his immense influence being some charm of mystery, as there is mystery in all the people that win us and rule us and hold us; as though we pressed our ear against this mystery and caught there the sound of a meaning vaster than ourselves – not meant for us but flowing away from us along the unbroken channels of the universe: still to be flowing there long after we ourselves are stilled.
Thus he stood in his library that morning when his son left him, brought to a stop in the road of life as by a straw fallen at his feet borne on a rising wind – another harbinger of a coming storm.
By and by not far away a door on that side of the house was slammed. The sound of muffled feet was heard on the porch and then the laughter of children as they bounded across the yard. As his ear caught the noises, he hurried to the window and looked out; and then he threw up the sash and hailed them loudly: —
"Ho, there! you winter snow-birds without wings!"
As the children wheeled and paused, he smiled and shook his forefinger: —
"Remember to keep those two red mouths closed and to breathe through those two red noses!" and then as he recalled some exercises which he had lately been putting them through, he added with ironic emphasis, laughing the while: —
"And when you breathe, remember to bring into play those two invaluable little American diaphragms and those two priceless pairs of American ribs!"
The little girl nodded repeatedly to indicate that she could understand if she would and would obey if she cared; and putting her red-mittened finger-tips to her lips, she threw him a good-by with a wide sweeping gesture of the arms to right and left. And the boy made a soldierly salute, touching a hand to his skull-cap with the uncouth rigor of a veteran in the raw: then they bounded off again.
The doctor drew down the sash and watched them.
A hundred yards from the house the ground sloped to a limestone spring at the foot of the hill – a characteristic Kentucky formation. From this spring issued a brook, on the banks of which stood a clump of forest trees, bathing their roots in the moisture. Upon reaching the brow of this hill, the boy lagged behind his sister as though to elude her observation; then turning looked back at his father – looked but made no sign: a little upright pillar of life on the brow of that declivity: then he dropped out of sight.
A few moments later up over the hill where he was last seen a little cloud of autumn leaves came scurrying. As they neared the wall of the house where the wind by pressure veered skyward to clear the roof, some of the leaves were caught up and dashed against the windowpanes behind which the doctor was standing. Had the sash been raised, they would have thrown themselves into his arms and have clung to his neck and breast.
He did not know why, but they caused him a pang: those little brown parchments torn from the finished volume of the year: they caused him a subtle pang.
He turned from the window, goaded by more than resolution, and crossed to his writing-desk on the opposite side: there lay the work mapped out for the morning. No interruptions were to be expected from his patients, though of course there might be new patients since accidents and illnesses befall unheralded. There would be no visitors – not to-day. In a country of the warmest social customs and of family ties so widely interknit that whole communities are bound together as with vine-like closeness, no one visits on the day before Christmas. In every little town the world of people crowd the streets and shops or busy themselves in preparations at home: out in the country those who have not flocked to the towns are as joyously occupied. No visitors, then. And the children were gone – no disturbances from their romping. The servants had put his rooms in order, and were too discreetly trained to return upon their paths.
After breakfast, at the stable, he had given orders to his man for the day while he was having a look at his horses – well-stalled, well-groomed, docile, intelligent: at his gaited saddle-horse, at the nag for his buggy, at the perfectly matched pair for his carriage. As he appeared in the doorway of the stalls, each beast, turning his head, had sent to him its affectionate greeting out of eyes that looked like wells of soft blue smoke: each said, "Take me to-day."
He was a little vain of being weatherwise, as is apt to be the case with country-bred folk: and at the last stable door, having studied the wind and the sky and the temperature, he had said to his man that the weather was changing: it would be snowing by afternoon. Usually in that latitude the first flurry of snow gladdens the eye near Thanksgiving, but sleighs are not often flying until late in December. There had been no snow as yet; it was due, and the weather showed signs of its multitudinous onset.
He felt so sure in his forecast that he had instructed his man to put the sleigh in readiness. He himself went into the saddle-house and from a peg amid the gear and harness he took down the sleighbells. As he shook them roughly, he smiled as above that cascade of mellow winter sounds there settled a little cloud of summer dust. He observed that the leather needed mending – what he called "a few surgical stitches"; and he had brought the bells with him to the house and they now lay on the floor of his office in the adjoining room.
He thought that if it should snow heavily enough he would use the sleigh when he started out in the afternoon. There were several sick children to visit on opposite horizons of his neighborhood. The sound of the bells as he drove in at their front gates might have value: it would not only mean the coming of his sleigh, but it would suggest to them the approach of that mysterious Sleigh of the World which that night they were expecting. Afterwards he was to go to a distant county seat for a consultation. His road home was a straight turnpike: it would be late when he returned, perhaps far in the night; and he would have the sound of the bells to himself – the bells and his thoughts and Christmas Eve.
This plan of Dr. Birney's regarding the children laid bare one of his ideas as a physician. For years he had employed increasingly in his practice the power of suggestion. For years life as he sometimes surmised had employed the power of suggestion on him. He felt assured that in treating the sick there are cases where every suggestion of happiness that can reach a patient draws him back toward life: every suggestion of unhappiness lowers his vitality and helps to roll him over the precipice: the final push need be a very slight one. The melody of sleighbells falling on the ears of the sick children that afternoon might have the weight of a sunbeam on delicate scales and tip the balances as he wished: he believed that many a time the weight of a mental sunbeam was all that was needed to decide the issue.
He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock, and dinner was served at one, and he had a tranquil outlook for three hours of work. The only remaining source from which an interruption could have reached him was his wife. His wife! – his wife never – intruded.
Not three hours, but two hours and a half, to be exact; for the dining-room adjoined his library, and every day at half past twelve o'clock his wife entered the dining-room to superintend final preparations for dinner: from the instant of her entrance concentration of mind ended for him: he occupied himself with things less important and with odds and ends for mind and body.