"Is somebody very sick?"
The head under the weather-roughened hat nodded silently.
"I wonder how it happens that all the sick are in our neighborhood."
A smile flitted across the doctor's mouth.
"The sick are in all neighborhoods, little wonderer."
He said this cheerfully. It was his idea—and he tried to enforce it at home—that young children must never, if possible, make the acquaintance of the wordsbadandsad—nor of the realities that are masked behind them. He especially believed that what the old are familiar with as life's tragic laws ought never to be told to children as tragic: what is inevitable should never be presented to them as misfortunes.
Therefore he now declared that the sick are in all neighborhoods as he might have stated that there are wings on all birds, or leaves on all growing apple trees.
"Not all over the world?" asked the boy, enlarging his vision in space.
"All over the world," admitted the doctor with entire cheerfulness; the fact was a matter of no consequence.
"Not all the time?" asked the boy, enlarging his outlook in time.
"All the time! All over the world and all the time!" conceded the doctor, as though this made not the slightest difference to a human being.
"Isn't there a single minute when everybody is well everywhere?"
"Not a single, solitary minute."
"Then somebody must always be suffering."
The doctor nodded again; the matter was not worth speaking of.
"Then somebody else must always be sorry."
The doctor bowed encouragingly.
"Then I am sorry, too!"
This time the doctor did not move his head, and he did not open his lips. He saw that a new moment had arrived in the boy's growth—a consciousness of the universal tragedy and personal share and sorrow in it. He knew that many people never feel this; some feel it late; a few feel it early; he had always said that children should never feel it. He knew also that when once it has begun, it never ends. Nothing ever banishes it or stills it—that perception of the human tragedy and one's share and sorrow in it.
He did not welcome its appearance now, in his son least of all. For an instant he charged himself with having made a mistake in taking the child along on his visits to the sick, thus making known too early the dark side of happyneighborhood life. Then he went further back and traced this premature seriousness to its home and its beginning: in prenatal depression—in a mother's anguish and a wife's despair. It was a bitter retrospect: it kept him brooding.
The chatter was persistent. A hand was stretched up, and it took hold of his chin and shook it:—
"There ought to be a country where nobody suffers and there ought to be a time; a large country and a long time."
"There is such a country and there is such a time, Herbert," said the doctor, now with some sadness.
"Then I'll warrant you it's part of the United States," cried the boy, getting his idea of mortality slightly mixed with his early Americanism. "Texas would hold them, wouldn't it? Don't you think Texas could contain them all and contain them forever?"
The doctor laughed and seemed to think enough had been said on the subject of large enough graveyards for the race.
"Why don't you doctors send your patients to that country?"
"Perhaps we do sometimes!" The doctor laughed again.
"Do you ever send yours?"
"Possibly."
"And how many doyousend?"
"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 lazilytrotting 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."
"Thenyou turn in!"
"Then Idon'tturn 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'sBull.
"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 arattling 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 impulsivelyopened 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 piercehim. 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 aboutyour duty to millions and millions and millions of your fellow medicine takers. Can you understand that?"
"Gracious! That would be abigpill—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 thanyouare, 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 inmypractice; never! But we won't try that hardlittle 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 abag 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 dothat, 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."
"Onbotharms, did you say?"
"No; ononearm."
"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 mustnotbe on the cheek! Remember, you are no son of mine if it's on the cheek!"
"I thought I heard you saythatgot 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 whenI've thought ofthat; 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'scows, Governor," he said, wiping the tears away. "Not abouthumankissing. 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 aboutthat! 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 toprovethey 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 herwhat?"
"Ask her nothing! Askher!"
"You meantellher, don't you? Not ask her, my friend and relative;tellher!"
"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 triedbothways! 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 couldnot 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. Askme!"
The boy standing before his father said with a strange quietness and stubbornness, probing him deeply through the eyes:—
"You haven't answered mylastquestion 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 doyouknow about sad? Who toldyouanything about sad?" muttered the doctor with new sadness now added to old sadness.
"Nobodyhadto 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.
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 slantsacross 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 hisproportions: 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 holdus; 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 leavescame 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 froma 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 increasinglyin 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 withthings less important and with odds and ends for mind and body.
She would draw the shades of the windows delicately to temper the light according as the day was cloudy or cloudless; she would bring fresh flowers for the table; she would inspect the clearness of the cut glass, the brightness of the silver, the snowiness of the napkins; she would prepare at the sideboard a salad, a sauce; she would give a final push to the chairs—last of all a straightening push to his. All the lower drudgery of the servants and all the higher domestic triumphs of her skill led to his chair—as to a kind of throne where the function of feeding reigned. With that final adjustment of the piece of furniture in which his body was to be at ease while it gorged itself, with that act of grade, the doors were opened; dinner was announced; he walked in, and faced his wife, and dined—with Nemesis.
This pride of hers in housekeeping was part of her inheritance, of the civilization of her land and people: it was a little separate dynasty of itself. Often as the years had gone by he had been thankful that she could thus far find compensation for larger disappointment; it helped to keep her a healthy woman if it could not render her a happy wife. Near the sugarand the flour she could perhaps three times a day realize small perfections; she could mould little ideals and turn them out on the shelf and verify them with a silver spoon: an ideal life in the pantry for a woman who had expected an ideal life with him in library and parlor and bedroom and out in the world. It was all as if she sat at the base of Love's ruined Pyramids and tried to divert her desolation by configuring ant hills.
And he was well aware that this pride of housekeeping was the least of all the prides that grouped themselves around that central humiliation of wifehood. He had sometimes thought that if, after her death, over her were planted a weeping willow, mere nutritive pride in her dust would force the boughs to reverse their natural direction and shoot upward as stiff as a spruce.
The dining-room, in the old-fashioned Kentucky way, was richly carpeted; but the moment she set her foot within it, he could trace her steps as unerringly as though she had been shod with explosives. Likewise she sang to herself a good deal: (he had long ago diagnosed that symptom of nervous self-consciousness).
When he had married her, voice and pianohad been one of the resources he thought he would hold in reserve for the emptying years; music would fill so much rational silence. It was one of his semi-serious declarations that only two people more or less out of their senses could keep on talking to each other till death forced them to hold their tongues. But with tragic swiftness and sureness a few years after their marriage the music stopped, the piano was shut.
More than that terminated. After two children were born, there were no more: that profound living music came to an end also. And perhaps one of the deepest desires of his nature was for that kind of long union with his wife and for many children: perhaps the only austerity in him was an austere patriarchal authority to people the earth and to bequeath the inheritance of it to his seed.
When she had ceased singing to him soon after marriage, she had begun to sing to herself—habitually during this half-hour of proximity. The sound took up a fixed abode in his ear as there is a roaring in a seashell. He could hear it miles across the country; it was the loudest sound to him in this world—that barely audible self-conscious singing of his wife.
During this interval also she addressed hercommands to the maid in tones lowered not to disturb him. He could not hear the words, but there was no mistaking the tones! What beautiful, eager, victorious, thrilling tones—over a dish of steaming vegetables—over a savory toast! They forced him to be reminded that the nature of his wife was not a brook run dry; its leaping waters were merely turned away into another channel. Only when she spoke with him did the cadence of her tones sag; then all the modulations ran downhill as into some inner pit of emptiness.
It was impossible for him to believe that the occasional chuckle and cackle of the maid during these whispered colloquies grew out of aspersions winged at him—at the hungry ogre, middle-aged, almost corpulent, on the other side of the wall; at the species of advanced gorilla, poorly disguised in collar and necktie and midway garments; and with wool and leather drawn over his lower pair of modernized walking hands! Yet the truth was undeniable that when dinner was announced and he went in, the maid, standing behind her mistress's chair, fixed her gaze on him with fresh daily delight in understanding or misunderstanding the wretchedness of the household.
The first time he had ever seen this maid was one evening upon going in to supper. They were expecting guests, and his wife wore an evening gown. As he seated himself, he became aware almost without glancing across the table that something novel had arrived upon the scene—something youthful yet as immemorial as Erebus. Behind the glistening whiteness of his wife's bust with its cold proud dignity, there was something sable—birdlike—all beak and eyes—with a small head on which grew a kind of ruffled indignant feathers. He tried to take no further notice of the apparition, but could not escape the experience that several times during the meal he rescued his biscuit as from between the claws of a competing raven.
In the course of time, as this combination of black and white refused to dissolve and rather coalesced into a duality holding good for meal hours, he felt impelled to characterize the alliance—to envisage for his own relief the totality of its comic gloom. So he called it hisBust of Pallasand hisNevermore. And hisNevermore, perched behind hisBust of Pallasat every function, fixed her dull stupid eyes on him in unceasing judgment. He was never quite persuaded of the human reality of her; never fullybelieved that she reached to the carpet: and he never got up from the table to see whether she cast a shadow on the floor; but he knew that it was the fowl's intention to cast whatsoever shadow it carried about with itupon him.
She had become a critic of his domestic relations. This servant, this mal-arrangement of beak and eyes, with bare brain enough not to let plates fall and not to dangle her fingers in scalding water nor singe her head-feathers in the oven—this servant of his arraignedhimin his humanity! And if this servant, then all his servants. And if all his servants, then all the servants of the neighborhood. The whole Plutonian shore croaked its black damnation of him. Ofhim!—the leading citizen of his community, its central vital character who held in his keeping the destiny of a people! He had a vision of the august assemblage of them uplifted into the heavenliness of an African Walhalla—such as is disclosed in the last act of theTetralogy—all gazing down upon him as a profaning Alberic who had raped the virgin Gold of marital love.
On a near peak of especial moral grandeur, hisNevermorestood in her supernal resentment of his wife's wrong. For whateverNevermorewas not, at least, she was woman. And what womanfails to espouse any wife's dignity except the woman who supplants the wife? (Not even she; for if ever in turn her hour comes, her first outcry is, 'I might have known.')
Dr. Birney did not have three hours for this morning's business, then, but two hours and a half; and forthwith beginning, he took from his breast-pocket a small book and transferred from it to a large diary his notes of visits to patients on the day preceding. This soon done, he was ready for the main work.
It was now the closing week of the year when according to custom he posted the year's books; for he was his own secretary. By New Year's Day his accounts were about ready and new books were opened.
He always took up with repugnance this valuation of his services. It was to him one of life's ironies that in order to live he must take toll of death. He must harvest his bread from the fields of tears. He must catch his annual treasure from those rainbows of hope that spanned weary pillows. He must fill his wine-jar by dipping his cup into the waves of Lethe. He must equip his very stable with the ferriage he had collected on the banks of the Styx.
His heart was never in his bookkeeping; this morning he could barely fix upon it his thoughts;so that before commencing he allowed himself to turn the leaves, getting a distasteful bird's-eye view of this panorama of neighborhood suffering and mortality there outspread on the table.
Two infants in January had had scarlet fever; so much for the infants and the fever. A boy had had measles; an assessment for measles. A girl had had mumps; the price of mumps. An old lady, going one bitter February afternoon to her hen-house to see whether the hens had begun to lay, had slipped on the ice-covered step and had fractured her hip-bone; damages for the friable hip-bone of the senile. A negro man, stationed in an ice-house to knock to pieces with an axe the blocks of ice as they were hauled from the pond, had had his feet frost-bitten. In April a stable-boy had been kicked in the groin and bitten in the shoulder by a stallion. This stallion, in whom survived the fighting traits of the wild horse and defiance of man as an enemy who had no use for him but to enslave him and work him to death, had already killed two stablemen. Too valuable for the stud to be himself killed, and too dangerous to be approached or handled, it was decided to destroy his eyesight; and the doctor had been called in to treat both stable-boy and stallion. There was a bill forhis services to the boy; none for the stallion; he was not a veterinary. But it was his hand that had jabbed the long needle into those virile unconquerable eyes—leaving that Samson Agonistes of the herd whose only crime had been to reject civilization, as was his right. There was no one to put out the doctor's eyes, who also had rejected civilization: which was not his right.
In June a lad, climbing a cherry tree with the ambition to capture the earliest cherries dangling scarlet, had fallen flat upon his back when the limb had split from the half-rotten trunk, thus jarring his spine. It was a bad case; he must now make out a good bill for it, otherwise the father would feel resentful.
In harvest time one of his friends, a young farmer, overheated, went bathing too soon in a fresh-water pond—made cooler by a recent hail-storm; between the leaves lay a note from his widow, with its deep black border and its mourning perfume; she had asked for the account—had asked punctiliously to pay for a beloved young husband's fatal chill. In autumn two barefoot half-grown brothers were cutting ironweeds in a pasture with hemphooks; the elder by too heavy a stroke had sent his blade clean through a clump of weeds into the ankle of the younger, slashing it to the bone.
Thus the record ran on as the doctor turned the pages in a preliminary survey of his chart of suffering. And then there were the cases of those coming into the world and the cases of those going out: birth-rates, death-rates. He must exact of Nature his fee for continuing the existence of the human race; and he must go about among his friends and neighbors and wring money out of them because those they loved best had merely paid their own decent debt to mortality.
He dipped his pen into the ink, drew before him some blanks, and began to make out the bills. The rooms were very quiet and comfortable; winter sunshine entered through the windows; the Christmas wind frolicked outside the walls.
To be forced to sit there and say to the world: My feelings have nothing to do with it: you must pay what you owe! Because all life is payment; everything is a settlement. There is but one that is exempt—Nature. It is only she who never fails to collect a debt but who never pays one. Who that has ever lived our common human life, borne its burdens, felt its cares, fought against its wrongs, who but knows that Nature is in debt to him? But whatson of hers has ever been able to tear his due from her!
More may be learned about the doctor by an inspection of his rooms. Of these there were three, with a small fourth chamber as an ell in the house: in this ell there was a single bed, and here he sometimes slept—as nearly outside the house as it was possible to lie and still to be within it.
The room in which he now worked was his library; communicating through an open door was his office; beyond the office through another open door was a third room in which were stored many personal articles of indoor and outdoor use.
Beginning with his office, you derived the knowledge which any physician's and surgeon's office, if modern and complete, should afford. On one wall hung his diploma from a New York Medical College; on another a diploma from Vienna for post-graduate study and hospital work.
The rooms taken together bore testimony in their entire equipment to a general outside truth: that the physician who lived in them was not a country doctor because he had been crowded by abler members of the profession out of the cities where there are many into thecountry where there are none: and this fact in turn had its larger historic significance.
Almost within a generation a radical change has taken place in the relation of town and country as regards the profession of medicine. The old barriers which half a century ago separated the sick in the streets from the sick in fields and forests have been swept away. The city physician now twenty-five miles away can often arrive more quickly than a country doctor who lives five; and a surgeon can come in an hour who formerly needed half a day. But many now living with long memories can well remember the time when the country doctor ruled in his neighborhood as the priest in mediæval Europe swayed his parish. However remote, he was always sent for. His form was the very image of rescue, his face was the light of healing. As a consequence, the country often developed leaders in the profession. Instead of its being dependent upon the cities, these looked to the rural districts for many of the most skilful practitioners.
This was strikingly true from the earliest settlement of the West on that immense plateau of forest and grass land which has long since drawn to itself the notice of the world as the loveliness of Kentucky. It was on the southernboundary of this plateau, living in a pioneer hamlet and practising far and wide through a wilderness, that a country doctor became the father of ovarian surgery in the United States and won the reverence of the world of science and the gratitude of humanity. In another pioneer settlement one of the greatest of American lithotomists spread the lustre of his name and the goodness of his deeds over the whole country west of the Alleghany Mountains; and these were but two of those many country doctors who there for well-nigh a century were the reliance of their people: physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nurses, pharmacists, friends—all in one.
This powerful and brilliant tradition had descended to Dr. Birney, and he had worthily upheld it. In some respects he had solidly advanced it, notably in his treatment of children's diseases.
A second room, in which the articles of his personal life were kept, gave further knowledge of him as a man. Outside the windows there was a tennis court; he played tennis with his children and with young people of the neighborhood. You saw his racquet on the wall; and if you had opened a closet, you would have found the flannels and the shoes. Elsewhere onthe wall you saw his reel. In season he liked to fish, when his patients also could go fishing, or at least were well enough to feel like going; and in the same closet you might have noted the residue of a fisherman's outfit. He fished not only for black bass, but for that mild pond and creek fish prized as a delicacy on Kentucky tables—a variety of the calico bass known in the local vocabulary as "newlight."
Still elsewhere you saw his game bag and bird gun—he liked to call it by the older word, fowling-piece. He hunted: quail, doves, wild duck. In another closet you would have been interested to discover his regalia as a member of the Order of Masons; and well placed beside it his uniform as a member of the State Guard—the two well placed there. When years before his neighbors had enrolled him in the Guard, they had saluted him as one more Kentucky Colonel. "I will submit to no official degradation," he had said; "I am already the Commander of the whole army of you on the field of your human Waterloo: salute your General!"
His library added its testimony as to other humanities. Scattered about on tables and mantel-piece were fine old pipes and boxes of cigars and playing-cards. There were poker chips, showing that the doctor had poker neighbors(where else if not there?), though whist was his game. You realized that he was a man at home among a people who loved play—must have play. On his sideboard were temperate decanters: he had sideboard neighbors. Altogether a human-looking room for much that is human; easy to enter, comfortable to stay in, hard to quit.
But our closest friends can come so close to us and no closer; they surround us but none of them enters us. Nature forbids that any but our own feet should cross the bridge spanning the distance between other people and the fortress of the individual. Across that bridge we can take with us no companions except those that keep silent amid its silences; that can speak to us but that cannot see us: those great voices without eyes; those great listeners without ears; great counsellors without criticism; great hands that guide and refuse to smite; great judges that embody law and refuse to sit in judgment on us—Books.
Some of the doctor's books held for him life's indispensable laughter; and no one of us ever tells all the things in this world that we laugh at. Some held for him life's tears; and no one of us ever tells the things that secretly start our own. Some held neither laughter nor tears but what isabove both—life's calm; and what one of us but at times feels the need to ascend to some inner mountain-top of our own spirits—far above the whole darkened or radiant cloud-rack of emotion—and look futureward into the promised peace, the end of our wandering. Joys—sorrows—and calm: these three for him, too.
Such books stayed with the doctor year after year. He could wake in the night and find them through the darkness; in the darkness they knew how to find him. They were not part of his medical library, of course, which was another matter. But they filled three sides of a large low revolving bookcase in the middle of the room beside his easy chair and his lamp and table.
The fourth side of his bookcase held the books that came and went as a stream, entering and passing on: he drank from them as they flowed by. Always they were books of fiction or biography which held in solution the truth of the human matter about some life that had fought or was fighting its path through to victory. Always he would have books of victory. By preference it must be a story real or imagined of some boy, youth, young man, middle-aged man, who was in the struggle for existence and whowas on the side of survival. He kept in mind the words of a great Frenchman that the way to make an impression upon the world is to plough through humanity like a cannon-ball or to creep through it like a pestilence. But he knew that in this world there are very few human cannonballs, though of such pestilence there is always more than enough. Rather every common man's life, and every uncommon man's life, is a drawn sword that has to cut its way through all other drawn swords. Here were the books which disclosed the mettle of a character: the last magnificent refusal to be ruined by evil which is the very breath of a man and the slow measure of the world's advance. So that, while much is always failing in everybody, all is never failing. Out of the blackest abyss there arises in the wounded and prostrate some white peak of unmelting innocence—at the base of which Life's battle rages.
Many a time long after midnight he would read to a finish some such triumphant story; and with a murmur of "Well done!" he would close the book, turn out his lamp, and go to sleep in his chair with his clothes on—with that scene of victory emptying its echoes into his ear and his dreams.
Here, then, was some discrete knowledge of thedoctor as a doctor and as a man. But there was one thing in his library that blended these two separate aspects, showing how the man felt as a physician and how the physician felt as a man. This was a series of pictures running around the walls and connecting great epochs in the progress of Medicine.
He had a liking, as the world has, for some brief series of climaxes that will depict a subject at a glance. Very memorable to him was Shakespeare's Seven Ages—because they were seven and were thus easily grasped by poetry and reason. But he knew that Shakespeare might as truly have substituted another seven—with as good poetry and reason; or he might have made the ages fourteen or forty-nine or forty-nine hundred; for actually the ages of a man's life are infinite; but being reduced to seven, we all recognize them.
And memorable to him likewise had been Hogarth'sProgress of the Rakewith its few pictures; and hisProgress of the Harlotwith its few; and hisProgress of Marriage à la Modewith its few; and theProgress of Crueltywith its fewest of all—only four, but more than enough! And yet the stages in the progress of the rake and of the harlot and of marriage à la mode and of cruelty are infinite; and at no single stage inthe progress of any one of them could you actually find either Rake or Harlot or Infidelity or Cruelty. Being portrayed as few, the world understands and finds its own account in them.
So around the walls of his library there hung a series of pictures showing the progress of Medicine across the ages.
The first picture represented a scene in the life of primitive man, during the period when he had long enough been man to form into hostile tribes, but not long enough to have advanced far from the boundaries of the brute. It is a battle picture: the battle is over: the survivors are gone: the dead and wounded lie about. Medicine as a human science has not yet been born; surgery has not yet separated itself from the movements of instinct. Yet there was activity among the wounded. In some of the warriors you saw such attempts in the care of their wounds as one may witness to-day in wounded birds and animals—if one is fortunate enough to be so placed as to be able to watch: there were the instinctive devices to cleanse, to protect, to alleviate: those low beginnings of the great science which you may observe to-day in your dog when he has come home after a fight with lacerated ears and slashed thighs—when he crawls under the porch tothe darkest corner to keep away other dogs and light and flies; whose sole instrument of cleansing is his tongue and whose only bathing fluid is saliva. On that battle-field you saw such beginnings of surgery as to-day is practised by a bird treating its broken wing or broken leg. Thus the wounded warriors concerned themselves with their hurts—all mother-naked. Along one edge of the battle-field was a stream of running water; some had started to draw themselves toward this and had died on the way. One was stretched full alongside—a young chief of magnificent proportions and a face of higher intelligence. And out of that intelligence, as a marvellous advance in the development of man, you saw one action: he was dipping up water in the palm of his hand and pouring it upon his wound. At some moment in the history of the race there must somewhere have been that first movement of the developing animal to substitute water for saliva. That great historic moment was depicted there. It was still the Azoic Age of Medicine.
Near by hung a second picture. Ages have passed, no one knows how many. The brute has become Prometheus; he has learned the use of fire; and he has learned the most heroic application of flame—to touch it to himselfwhere he is in greatest agony: that is, he has learned to cauterize his wounds. More than fire can he now handle; he has learned to bring together fat and flame; and he has discovered how from flame to produce oil; and he has learned to pour boiling oil into the holes in his body made by the implements of war. It is the long Ages of Medicine for the cautery and burning oil.
A third picture hung next. More ages have passed, no one knows how many; and the scene is another battle-field far down toward modern times. It is France; it is the second half of the sixteenth century; it is warfare in Piedmont. Troops are sweeping up the hill, and in the background is a walled city with turrets and towers; and in the foreground wounded soldiers are arriving or are lying about on the ground. There is a rude mass of masonry used as an operating-table; and on the operating-table is a soldier, one of whose legs has just been amputated above the knee; an attendant holds the saw with which the leg has just been sawed off, and the stump of it has dropped below. Beside the wounded man stand two figures: one the figure of the past; and the other a figure of the future—a poor barber's apprentice, father of modern surgery, named to be massacred on St. Bartholomew'seve, but spared because none but a despised Huguenot could be found in all France skilful enough to safeguard the royal orthodox blood. There beside the soldier they stand, these two, and in them ages meet; for the figure of the past holds in his hand one of the cauteries that are kept redhot in a brazier near his feet; and the other holds in his a new thing in the world—a simple ligature. A great scene, a great epoch: the beginning of new surgery when the flowing of blood from amputations of the great arteries could be stopped by a mere bandage: that man—Ambroise Paré!
More centuries have passed—we know exactly how many now from year to year. It is the nineteenth, and it is the New World; the next picture on the library wall portrayed a scene on the Western frontier of a new civilization. It is the backwoods of Kentucky, it is a pioneer settlement of three or four hundred souls, nearly a thousand miles from any hospital or dissecting-room. In the front door of his rude pioneer house stands a Kentucky country doctor, Ephraim MacDowell. His patient is before him, a woman on horseback in a side-saddle. She has just arrived, having ridden some seventy miles through the wilderness. He is assisting her to alight; and he issoon to perform, without consultation, without precedent in the ages of surgery (but not without a prayer for himself and her), by strength of his own will and nerve and by the light of the solitary candle of his own genius, an operation which made Kentucky the mother of ovarian surgery for all coming time, a new epoch of life and mercy: he going his own way to immortality as Shakespeare went his, as the greatest always go theirs—by a new path untrumpeted and alone.
Another picture represented a scene in Boston in 1846, less than half a century later; for the lonely mountain peaks of progress stretching across the ages are beginning to crowd each other now; they are beginning to run together into a range of continuous discovery. That picture also shows an operating-room; and there stood the American Morton, making for the world the first merciful use of anæsthetics: with which the silence of painlessness fell upon humanity's old outcry of torture under treatment.
There the doctor's pictures ended. In our own time he might have added one more for the epoch of the Roentgen Ray and another for the Finsen Light; and another for transfusion of blood; and still others crowning other mountain-tops in the new Surgery and new Medicine.
Thus he had before his eyes in his library some few Ages of his Science—as it went forward and slipped back and missed the road and forgot the road, yet somehow steadily advanced across the centuries like an erring unconquerable man across his years. Not progressing however as a man grows, from infancy to decrepitude; but moving from its old age toward its youth, always toward its youth, as Swedenborg's Angels fly forever toward their Spring. It ran around his walls like a great roadway, connecting the last discoveries of his Science with the surgery of the wolf who gnaws off his imprisoned leg and with the medicine of the sick dog that eats grass.
He called it his World's Path of Lessening Pain.
It was the last refuge and solace of his often tired and often wounded mind. Even after friends were gone at night and the poker chips were stacked or the whist counters folded; after the sideboard had been visited and temperately forsaken; after the abiding books had done for him what they could; in the still house far into the night, he would sometimes lie back in his chair and survey those battle-pictures of a science on which he was spending his loyalty and his strength.
Once, in younger days, outside the Eternal City, he had gone to study those fragments of the Old Roman Aqueduct that to-day are slowly crumbling on the Campagna; and standing alone before it he had in imagination searched for the figure of some young workman who had helped to mould those brick or to finish those columns: the figure of some obscure vanished peasant. So the great wall of his science, being built onward across the centuries into the future, would be revisited by men of the future in places where it stood in ruins. He would be as one whose life with its mistakes was yet linked to indestructible good. He would vanish from beside the wall himself, but his work upon it would have helped to uphold humanity. And many a night he went asleep in his chair, committing himself to his Science, as the forgotten Roman laborer of old may have fallen asleep under his own arch.