"Over thee bright dews be shaken;On thine eyelids violets blow;At thy hand white stars awaken;Past thee sun and darkness go!"In the world where thou art vanished,All dear things are ever young.I as thou will soon be vanished,I like thee from nought am sprung."Slumber, slumber! Why awaken?No one now believes in thee.I shall sleep while worlds are shaken—No one will believe in me."
"Over thee bright dews be shaken;On thine eyelids violets blow;At thy hand white stars awaken;Past thee sun and darkness go!
"In the world where thou art vanished,All dear things are ever young.I as thou will soon be vanished,I like thee from nought am sprung.
"Slumber, slumber! Why awaken?No one now believes in thee.I shall sleep while worlds are shaken—No one will believe in me."
It was the poorest, most faltering, yet most faithful voice—the mere note of a linnet long before the singing season has begun. As it died out, she descended from her premature perch and went with her repudiated book to the shelves where it must be put—not to be taken downagain. In the shadow of the library and with the uncertainty of her glasses, she fumbled as she sought the place, and the volumes on each side collapsed together. Whereupon a large key slid from the top and fell to the floor. With a low cry of delight—but of regret also—she seized it and held it up:—
"Oh, Harold, the key! I have found it!"
As the others hurried to her, she said to Elsie, as though boys were not fine enough to understand anything so fine:—
"It was like mamma to hide the keythere! She gave it to the old Christmas stories to keep and guard!"
Soon after this the children were not seen in the room. Some one came for them, and they were made ready for supper. After supper they were kept well guarded in another part of the house; and at an earlier hour than usual the little flock were herded up-stairs and at the top divided along masculine and feminine by-paths toward drowsy folds.
No lights were brought into the room where they had been playing. The red embers of the anthracite sank lower under their ashes: all was darkness and silence for the mysteries of Christmas Eve.
THE REALM OF MIDNIGHT
Aquarter of a century ago or more the German Christmas Tree—the diffusion of which throughout the world was begun soon after the close of the Napoleonic wars—had not made its way into general use throughout the rural districts of central Kentucky. The older Dutch and English festivals which had blent their features into the American holiday was the current form celebrated in blue-grass homes. The German forest-idea had been adopted in the towns for churches and other public festivities; and in private houses also that were in the van of the world-movement. But out in the country the evergreen had not yet enriched the great winter drama of Nature with its fresh note of the immortal drawn from a dead world: the evergreen was to eyes there the evergreen still, as the primrose to other eyes had been the primrose and nothing more.
Thus there was no Christmas Tree; and Christmas Eve brought no joy to children exceptthat of waiting for Christmas morning. Not until they went to sleep or feigned slumber; not until fires died down in chimney-corners where socks and stockings hung from a mantelpiece or from the backs of maternal and paternal chairs—not till then did the Sleigh of the White World draw near across the landscape of darkness. Out of its realm of silence and snow it was suddenly there!—outside the house, laden with gifts, drawn by tireless reindeer and driven by its indefatigable forest-god. He was no longer young, the driver, as was shown in his case, quite as it is shown in the case of commoner men, by his white beard and round ruddy middle-aged face; but his twinkling eyes and fresh good humor showed that the core of him was still boyish; and apparently the one great lesson he had learned from half a lifetime was that the best service he could render the whole world consisted in giving it one night of innocent happiness and kindness. Not until well on toward midnight was he there at the house, without sound or signal, the Sleigh perhaps halted at the front gate or drawn up behind aged cedar trees in the yard; or for all that any one knew to the contrary, resting lightly on the roof of the house itself, or remaining poised up in the air.
At least on the roofhewas: he peeked downthe chimney to see whether the fire were out (and he never by any mistake went to the wrong chimney): then he scrambled hurriedly down. If any children were in bed in the room, he tickled the soles of their feet to prove if they were asleep; then crammed socks and stockings; dispersed other gifts around on the tops of furniture; left his smile on everything to last a year—the smile of old forgiveness and of new affection—and was up the chimney again—back in the Sleigh—gone! Gone to the next house, then to the next, and on from house to house over the neighborhood, over the nation, over the world: the first to operate without accidental breakdown the heavier-than-air machine, unless it were possibly a remote American kinswoman of his, the New England witch on her broomstick aeroplane: which however she was never able to travel on outside New England. In this belting of the globe with a sleigh in a single night he must often have come to rivers and mountain ranges where passage was impossible; and then it is certain that the Sleigh was driven up to the roadway of the clouds and travelled across the lonely stretches of the snow before it fell.
Why he should come near midnight—who ever asked such a question? Has not that houralways been the natural locality and resort for the supernatural? What things merry or sorry could ever have come to pass but for the stroke of midnight? How could Shakespeare have written certain dramas without the mere aid of twelve o'clock? What considerable part of English literature would drop out of existence but for the fact that Big Ben struck twelve!
The children stood at the head of the stairs; and the Great Night which was to climb so high began for them low down—with the furniture. Standing there, they listened for the sound of any movement in the house: there was none, and they began to descend. Stairways in homesteads built as solid as that did not give way with any creaking of timbers under the pressure of feet; and they were thickly carpeted. Half way down the children leaned over the banisters and listened again.
Here at the turning of the stairway, directly below, there lived in his pointed weather-house the old Time-Sentinel of the family, who with his one remaining arm saluted evermore backward and forward in front of his stiff form; and at every swing of this limb you could hear his muscle crack in his ancient shoulder-joint. A metallic salute which the children had beenaccustomed to all their lives was one of the only two sounds that now reached them.
The other sound came from near him: sitting on the hall carpet on a square rug of tin especially provided for her was the winter companion of the time-piece—a large round mica-plated anthracite stove—middle-aged, designing, and corpulent. This seeming stove, whose puffed flushed cheeks now reflected an unusual excitement, gave out little comfortable wooing sounds, all confidential and travelling in a soft volley toward the sentinel, backed gaunt and taciturn against the wall.
The children of the house had long ago named this pair the Cornered Soldier and the Marrying Stove; and they explained the positions of the two as indicating that the stove had backed the veteran into the corner and had sat largely down before him with the determination to remain there until she had warmed him up to the proper response. The veteran however devoted his existence to moving his arm back and forth to ward off her infatuation, and meanwhile he persisted in muttering in his loudest possible monotone:Go away—keep off! Go away—keep off! Go away—keep off!There were seasons of course when the stove became less ardent, for even with the fibre of iron such pursuitsmust relax sometimes; but the veteran never permitted his arm to stop waving, trusting her least when she was cold—rightly enough!
At the foot of the stairway they encountered a pair of objects that were genuinely alive. Two aged setters with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle dispositions rose from where they lay near the stove, came around, and, putting their feet on the lowest step, stretched themselves backward with a low bow, and then, leaning forward with softly wagging tails, they pushed their noses against the two children of the house, inquiring why they were out of bed at that unheard-of hour: they offered their services. But being shoved aside, they returned to their places and threw themselves down again—not curled inward with chilliness, but flat on the side with noses pointed outward: they were not wholly reassured, and the ear of one was thrown half back, leaving the auditory channel uncurtained: they had no fear, but they felt solicitude.
The children made their way on tiptoe along the hall toward the door of the library. Having paused there and listened, they entered and groped their way to the far end where the doors connected this room with the parlor. As they strained their ears against these barriers, low sounds reached them from the other side:smothered laughter; the noise of things being taken out of papers; the sound of feet moving on a step-ladder; the sagging of a laden bough as it touched other laden boughs. Through the keyhole there streamed into the darkness of the library a little shaft of light.
"They are in there! There is a light in the room! They're hanging the presents on! We've caught them!"
The leader of the group was about to insert the key when suddenly upon the intense stillness there broke a sound; and following upon that sound what a chorus of noises!
For at that moment the old house-sentinel struck twelve—the Christmas-Night Twelve. The children had never heard such startling strokes—for the natural reason that never before had they been awake and alone at that hour. As those twelve loud clear chimes rang out, the two other guardians of the house drowsing by the clock, apprehensive after all regarding the children straying about in the darkness—these expressed their uneasiness by a few low gruff barks, and one followed with a long questioning howl—a real Christmas ululation! Then out in the henhouse a superannuated rooster drew his long-barrelled single-shooter out of its feather and leather case,cocked it and fired a volley point-blank at the rafters: the sound seemed made up of drowsiness, a sore throat, general gallantry, and a notice that he kept an eye on the sun even when he had no idea where it was—the early Christmas clarion! Further away in the barn a motherly cow, kept awake by the swayings and totterings of an infant calf apparently intoxicated on new milk, stood up on her hind feet and then on her fore feet and mooed—quite a Christmas moo! In a near-by stall an aged horse who now seemed to recognize what was expected of him on the occasion struggled to his fore feet and then to his hind feet, and squaring himself nickered—his best Christmas nicker! Under some straw in a shed a litter of pigs, disposed with heads and tails as is the packing of sardines—except that for the sardines the oil is poured on the general outside, but for the pigs it still remained on the individual inside—these pigs slept on—the proper Christmas indifference! For there had never been any holy art for them: nor miracles of their manger: they had merely been good enough to be eaten, never good enough to be painted! They slept on while they could!—mindful of the peril of ancestral boar's head and of the modern peril of brains for breakfast and sausage for supper.Then on the hearthstone of the library itself not far from where the children were huddled the American mouse which is always found there on Christmas Eve—this mouse, coming out and seeing the children, shrieked and scampered—a fine Christmas shriek! Whereat on the opposite side of the hearth a cricket stopped chirping and dodged over the edge of the brick—a clever Christmas dodge!
All these leaving what a stillness!
As noiselessly as possible the key was now inserted, the lock turned, and the door thrown quickly open; and there on the threshold of the forbidden room, the children gasped—baffled—gazing into total darkness! The coals of mystery forever glow even under the ashes in the human soul; and these coals now sent up in faint wavering flashes of a burnt-out faith: they were like the strange delicate wavering Northern lights above a frozen horizon: after all—in the darkness—amid the hush of the house—at the hour of midnight—with the perfume of wonderful things wafted thickly to their sense—after all, was there not some truth in the Legend?
Then out of that perfumed darkness a voice sounded: "Come in if you wish to come in!"
And the voice was wonderful, big, deep, merry, kind—as though it had but one meaning, thelove of the earth's children; it betokened almighty justice and impartiality to children. And it betrayed no surprise or resentment at being intruded upon. After a while it invited more persuasively: "Come in if you wish to come in."
And this time it seemed not so much to proceed from near the Tree as to emanate from the Tree itself—to be the Tree speaking!
The children of the house at once understood that the nature of their irruption had shifted. Their father in that disguised voice was issuing instructions that they were not to dare question the ancient Christmas rites of the house, nor attack his sacred office in them. For this hour he was still to be the Santa Claus of childish faith. Since they did not believe, they must make-believe! The scene had instantly been turned into a house miracle-drama: and they were as in a theatre: and they were to witness a play! And the voice did not hesitate an instant in its exaction of obedience, but at once entered upon the rôle of a supernatural personage:—
"Was I mistaken? Were not children heard whispering on the other side of a door, and was not the door unlocked and thrown open? They must be there! If they are gone, I am sorry.If they are still there—you children! I'm glad to see you. Though of course I don'tseeyou!"
"We're glad to see you—though we don't seeyou!"
"You came just in time. I was about going. What delayed me—but strange things have happened to-night! As I drove up to this house, suddenly the life seemed to go out of me. It was never so before. And as I stepped out of the Sleigh, I felt weary and old. And the moment I left the reins on the dashboard, my reindeer, which were trembling with fright of a new kind, fled with the Sleigh. And now I am left without knowing when and how I shall get away. But on a night like this wonderful things happen; and I may get some signal from them. A frightened horse will run away from its dismounted master and then come back to him. And they may come for me. I may get a signal. I shall wait. But as I said, I feel strangely lifeless: and I think I shall sit down. Will you sit down, please? Where you are, since you cannotseeany chairs," he said with the sweetest gayety.
In the darkness there were the sounds of laughing delighted children—grouping themselves on the floor.
"Now," said the voice, "I think I'll come around to your side of the Tree so that there'll be nothing between us!"
He was coming—coming as the white-haired Winter-god, Forest-spirit, of the earth's children! They heard him advance around from behind the Tree, moving to the right; and one of them who possessed the most sensitive hearing felt sure that another personage advanced more softly around from behind the Tree, on the left side. However this may be, all heardhimsit down, heard the boughs rustle about him as he worked his thick jolly figure back under them until they must have hung about his neck and down over his eyes: then he laughed out as though he had taken his seat on his true Forest Throne.
"When I am at home in my own country," he said, "I am accustomed to sleep with my back against an evergreen. I believe in your lands you prefer pine furniture: I like the whole tree."
A tender voice put forth an unexpected question:—
"Are you sure that there is not some one with you?"
"Is not that a strange question?"
"Ah yes, but in the old story when St. Nicholas arrived, an angel came with him: are you rightsure there's not an angel in the room with you now?"
"I certainlyseeno angel, though I think I hear the voice of one! Do you see any angel?"
"With my mind's eye."
"That must be the very best eye with which to see an angel!"
"But if there were a light in the room—!"
"Pardon me! If there were a light, I might not be here myself. If you changed the world at all, you would change it altogether."
A bolder voice broke in:—
"You're a very mysterious person, are you not?"
"Not more mysterious than you, I should say. Is there anything more mysterious than one of you children?"
"Oh, but that's a different kind of mysterious: we don't pretend to be mysterious: you do!"
"Oh, do I! You seem to know more about me than I know about myself. When you have lived longer, you may not feel so certain about understanding other people. But then I'm not people," he added joyously, and they heard him push his way further back under the boughs of the Tree—withdrawing more deeply into its mystery.
"Now then, while I wait, what shall we do?"
TIME-SPIRIT AND ETERNAL SPIRIT
Ahurried whispering began among the children, and the result was quickly announced:—
"We should like to ask you some questions." Evidently the intention was that questions should riddle him—make reasonable daylight shine through his mysterious pretensions: on the stage of his own theatre he was to be stripped.
"I treat all children alike," he replied with immediate insistence on his divine rights. "And if any could ask, all should ask. But suppose every living child asked me a question. That would be at least a million to every hair on my head: don't you think that would make any head a little heavy? Besides, I've always gotten along so well all over the world because I have done what I had to do and have never stopped to talk. As soon as you begin to talk, don't you get into trouble—with somebody? Who has ever forced a word out of me!"
How alert he was, nimble, brisk, alive! A marvellous kind of mental arctic light from him began to spread through the pitchiness of the room as from a sun hidden below the horizon.
"But everything seems going to pieces tonight," he continued; "and maybe I might let my silence go to pieces also. Your request is granted—but—remember, one question apiece—the first each thinks of—and not quarrelsome: this is no night for quarrelsome questions!"
The lot of asking the first fell naturally to Elsie, and her question had her history back of it; the question of each had life-history.
When Elsie first came to know about the mysterious Gift-bringer from the North, she promptly noticed in her sharp way that he was already old; nor thereafter did he grow older. She found pictures of him taken generations before she was born—and there he was just as old! She judged him to be about fifty-five years or sixty as compared with middle-aged Kentucky farmers, some of whom were heavy-set men like him with florid complexions, and with snow on their beards and hair, and mischievous eyes and the same high spirits. Only, there was one who had no spirits at all except the very lowest. This was a deacon of the country church, whoinstead of giving presents to the children once a year pushed a long-handled box at them every Sunday and tried to force them to make presents to him! One hot morning of early summer—he had so annoyed her—when the box again paused tantalizingly in front of her, she had shot out a plump little hand and dropped into it a frantic indignant June bug which presently raised a hymn for the whole congregation. She hated the deacon furthermore because he resembled Santa Claus, and she disliked Santa Claus because he resembled the deacon: she held them responsible for resembling each other. All this was long ago in her short life, but the ancient grudge was still lodged in her mind, and it now came out in her question:—
"Why did you wait to get old before you began to bring presents to children; why didn't you bestir yourself earlier; and what were you doing all the years when you were young?"
If you could have believed that trees laughed, you would have said that the Christmas Fir was laughing now.
"That is a very good question, but it is not very simple, I am sorry to say; and by my word I am bound not to answer it; you were told that the question must be simple! However, I am willing to make you a promise: I do not knowwhere I may be next year, but wherever you are, you will receive, I hope, a little book calledSanta Claus in the Days of his Youth. I hope you will find your question answered there to your satisfaction. And now—for the next."
During the years of Elizabeth's belief in the great Legend of the North, second to her delight in the coming of the gifts was sorrow at the going of them. Every year an avalanche of beautiful things flowed downward over the world, across mountain ranges, across valleys and rivers; and each house chimney received its share from the one vast avalanche. Every year! And for all she knew these avalanches had been in motion thousands of years. But where were the gifts? Gone, melted away; so that there were now no more at the end of time than there had been at the beginning. The fate of the vanished lay tenderly over the landscape of the world for her.
"You say that one night of every winter you drive round the earth in your sleigh, carrying presents. Every summer don't you disguise yourself and drive over the same track in an old cart and gather them up again? Many a summer day I have watched you without your knowing it!"
This time you could have believed that if evergreens are sensitive, the fir now stood withits boughs lowered a little pensively and very still.
"I am sorry! The question violates the same mischief-making rule, and by my word I am bound not to answer it. But it is as easy to give a promise to two as to one; next year I hope you will receive a little book calledSanta Claus with the Wounded and the Lost. And I wish you joy in that story. Now then!"
"Father told me not to ask any questions while I was over here: to wait and askhim."
The little theatre of make-believe almost crumbled to its foundations beneath that one touch of reality! The great personage of the drama lost control of his resources for a moment. Then the little miracle-play was successfully resumed:—
"Well, then, I won't have to answer any questions for you!"
"But I can tell you what I wasgoingto ask! I was going to ask you if you are married. And if you are, why you travel always without your wife. I was wondering whether you didn't likeyourwife!"
The answer came like a blinding flash—like a flash meant to extinguish another flash:—
"A book, a book! Another book! There will have to be another book! Look out for onenext Christmas, dropped down the chimney especially for you: and I hope it won't fall into the fire or into the soot—Santa Claus andhisWife. Now then—time flies!"
During the infantile years when the heir of the house had been a believer in the figure beside the Tree, there had always been one point he jealously weighed: whether children of white complexion were not entitled to a larger share of Christmas bounty than those of red or yellow or brown or black faces; and in particular whether among all white children those native to the United States ought not to receive highest consideration. The old question now rang out:
"What doyouthink of the immigrants?"
The Tree did not exactly laugh aloud, but it certainly laughed all over—with hearty wholesome approving laughter.
"That question is the worst offender of all; it is quarrelsome! It is the most quarrelsome question that could be asked. What are immigrants to me? But next year look out for a book calledSanta Claus on Immigrants."
"Put plenty of gore in it!"
"Gore! Gore on Christmas Eve! But if there was gore, since it is in a book, it would have to be dry gore. But wouldn't salve be better—salve for old wounds?"
"If you're going to put salve in, you might use my Waterloo salve!"
"Don't be peculiar, Herbert—especially away from home!"
Certainly the Tree was shaken with laughter this time.
"See what things grow to when once started; here were four questions, and now they fill four books. But time flies. Now I must make haste! My reindeer!—"
His ingenuity was evidently at work upon this pretext as perhaps furnishing him later on a way through which he might effect his escape: in this little theatre of thin illusion there must be some rear exit; and through this he hoped to retire from the stage without losing his dignity and the illusion of his rôle.
"My reindeer," he insisted, holding fast to that clew for whatsoever it might lead him to, "if they should rush by for me, I must be ready. A faint distant signal—and I'm gone! So before I go, in return for your questions I am going to ask you one. But first there is a little story—my last story; and I beg you to listen to it."
After a pause he began:—
"Listen, you children! You children of this house, you children of the world!
"You love the snow. You play in it, you hunt in it; it brings the melody of sleigh-bells, it gives white wings to the trees and new robes to the earth. Whenever it falls on the roof of this house and in the yard and upon the farm, sooner or later it vanishes; it is forever rising and falling, forming and melting—on and on through the ages.
"If you should start from your home to-night and travel northward, after a while you would find everything steadily changing: the atmosphere growing colder, living creatures beginning to be left behind, those that remain beginning to look white, the voices of the earth beginning to die out: color fading, song failing. As you journeyed on always you would be travelling toward the silent, the white, the dead. And at last you would come to a land of no sun and of all silence except the noise of wind and ice; you would have entered the kingdom of eternal snow.
"If from your home you should start southward, as you crossed land after land in the same way, you would begin to see that life was failing and the harmonies of the planet replaced by the discord of lifeless forces—storming, crushing, grinding. And at last you would reach the threshold of another world that you darednot enter and that nothing alive ever faces: the home of perpetual frost.
"If you should rise straight into the air from your housetop as though you were climbing the side of a mountain, you would find at last that you had ascended to a height where the mountain would be capped forever with snow. For all round the earth wherever its mountains are high enough, their summits are capped with the one same snow: above us all everywhere lies the upper land of eternal cold.
"Sometime in the future—we do not know when—the spirit of cold at the north will move southward; the spirit of cold at the south will move northward; the spirit of cold in the upper air will move downward; and the three will meet, and for the earth there will be one whiteness and silence—rest.
"Little children, the earth is burning out like a bedroom candle. The great sun is but a longer candle that burns out also. All the stars are but candles that one by one go out in the darkness of the universe. Now tell me, you children of this house, you children of the earth, for I make no difference among you and ask each the same question: when the earth and the sun and the stars are burnt out like your bedroom candles, where in that darkness will you be?Where will all the children of the earth be then?"
And now at last the Great Solemn Night drew apart its curtains of mystery and revealed its spiritual summit.
Out of these ordinary American children had all but died the last vestiges of the superstitions of their time and of earlier ages. They were new children of a new land in a new time; and they were the voices of fresh millions—voices that rose and floated far and wide as a revelation of the spirit of man stripped of worn-out rags and standing forth in its divine nakedness—wingèd and immortal.
"I know where I shall be," said the lad whose ideal of this life turned toward strength that would not fail and truth that could not waver.
"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose earthly ideal was selfishness: who had within herself humanity's ideal that hereafter somewhere in the universe all desires will be gratified.
"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose earthly ideal was the quieting of the world's pain: who had vague notions of a land where none would be sick and none suffer.
"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose ideal of life was the gathering and keepingof all beautiful things that none should be lost and that none should change.
Then in the same spirit in which the group of them had carried on their drama of the night they now asked him:—
"Where willyoube?"
For a while there was no answer, and when at length the answer came it was low indeed:—
"Wherever the earth's children are, may I be there with them!"
As the vast modern cathedral organ can be traced back through centuries to the throat of a dry reed shaken with its fellows by the wind on the banks of some ancient river, so out of the throats of these children began once more the chant of ages-that deep majestical organ-roll of humanity.
The darkened parlor of the Kentucky farmhouse became the plain where shepherds watched their flocks—it became the Mount of Transfiguration—it became Calvary—it became the Apocalypse. It became the chorus out of all lands, out of all ages:—
"And there were shepherds—The Lord is my shepherd—Unto us a child is born—I know that my Redeemer liveth—I know in whom I have believed—In my Father's house are many mansions—I go to prepare a place for you—WhereI am you may be also—The earth shall pass away, but my word will not pass away—Now is Christ risen from the dead—Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God Who is our home—Thou wilt not leave us in the dust—Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me—My Pilot face to face when I have crost the bar—"
In the room was the spiritual hymn of the whole earth from the beginning until now: that somewhere in the universe there is a Father and a Fatherland; that on a dying planet under a dying sun amid myriads of dying stars there is something that does not die—the Youth of Man. In that youth all that had been best in him will come to fullest life; all that was worst will have dropped away.
The room was very still awhile.
Then upon its intense stillness there broke a sound—faint, far away through the snow-thickened air—a melody of coming sleigh-bells. All heard, all listened.
"Hark, hark! Do you hear! Listen! They are coming for me! They're coming!"
The Tree shook as he who was sitting under its branches rose to his feet with these words.
"That is father's sleigh: I know those bells: those are our sleigh-bells. That is father!" said a grave boy excitedly.
"Ah! Is that whatyouthinkIhear! Then indeed it is time for me to be going!"
There was a rustling of the boughs of the Christmas Tree as though the guest were leaving.
Nearer, nearer, nearer, along the turnpike came the sound of the bells. At the front gate the sound suddenly ceased.
"They're waiting for me!" said a voice from behind the Tree as it moved away in the direction of the chimney.
Then all heard something more startling still.
The sleigh was approaching the house. Out of the silence and the darkness of Christmas Eve there was travelling toward the house another story—the drama of a man's life.
At the distance of a few hundred yards the sound of the sleigh-bells, borne softly into the room and to the rapt listeners, showed that the driver had turned out of the main drive and begun to encircle the house by that path which enclosed it as within a ring—within the symbol of the eternal.
Under old trees now snow-laden, past the flower-beds of summer, past the long branches of flowering shrubs and of roses that no longer scattered their petals, but now dropped the flowers of the sky, past thoughts and memories,it made its way: as for one who doubles back upon the track of experience with a new purpose and revisits the past as he turns away from it toward another future. Through the darkness, across the fresh snow, on this night of the anniversary of home life, there and on this final Christmas Eve after which all would soon vanish, he drew this band—binding together all the lives there grouped—putting about them the ring of oneness.
That mournful melody of secrecy and darkness began to die out. Fainter and fainter it pulsed through the air. At the gate it was barely heard and then it was not heard: was it gone or was it waiting there?
By the chimney-side there were faint noises.
"He is gone!" whispered Elizabeth with one intense breath.
WHEN A FATHER FINDS OUT ABOUT A SON
Christmashad passed, bringing up the train of its predecessors—the merry and sad parade of the years.
It departed a little changed, and it left the whole world a little changed by the new work of new children—by that innumerable army of the young who are ever usurping the earth from the old; who successively refashion it in their own image, and in turn growing old themselves leave it to the young again to refashion still further: leaving it always to the child, the destroyer and saviour of the race.
And yet it is the Child that amid all changes believes that it will escape all change.
Christmas had passed, and human nature had settled once more to routine and commonplace, starting to travel across another restful desert of ordinary days before it should reach another exhausting oasis of the unusual. The young broke or threw away or forgot their toys; theold lifted once more to their backs familiar burdens with a kind of fretful or patient liking for them.
The sun began to return with his fresh and ancient smiling. For a while after Christmas snows were deeper and dryer, but then began to fall more rarely and melt more swiftly. February turned its unfinished work over to March, and March received it, and among other things brought to its service winds and daffodils. The last flakes of snow as they sank through the sod passed the snowdrop pushing upward—the passing of the snowdrops of winter and of spring. In the woods wherever there was mistletoe—that undying pledge of verdure into which naturalists of old believed that the whole spirit of the tree had retreated for safety from the storm—wherever there was mistletoe, it began to withdraw from sight and hide itself amid young leaves bursting forth everywhere—universal annunciation that what had seemed dead yet lived. Out of the ground things sprouted and rose that had never lived before; but on old stocks also, as on the tops of old trees about the doctor's house, equally there was spring. For while there is life, there is youth; and as long as there is youth, there is growth. Life is youth, wholly youth; and death is notthe end of age nor of old age, but only the ending of youth: of briefer youth or extended youth, but always of youth.
Ploughing began in the Kentucky fields, and after the plough the sower went forth to sow. Dr. Birney as he drove along turnpikes and lanes looked out of his buggy and saw him. Beside him was his son, and the doctor was busy sowing also, sowing the seeds of right suggestion. Sometimes they met child patients whom the doctor had brought through the epidemic, they stopped and chatted triumphantly.
Altogether it was springtime for the doctor for more reasons than one. There was a change in him. He looked younger and he was younger. The weight as of a glacier had melted away from him. A new verdure of joy started forth. The beauty and happiness of the country about him found counterpart and response in his own nature.
One day as the two were driving across a fine growing landscape the doctor was trying to impart a larger idea of service; and so he was saying that there were three fathers: he was the first father—to be looked to for counsel and guidance and protection: this father was to be served loyally; he must be fought for if there were need, died for. But by and by the firstfather would step aside and a second take his place, much greater, more powerful—the fatherland. For this second father also his listener must be ready to fight, to die; he must look to it for guidance and safety. Then again in time the second father would disappear and the third Father would take him in hand—the Father of all things.
"And then I'll have to fight and die for the third Father."
"I am not so sure about the fighting and the dying," said the doctor with a quick, happy laugh.
"And after the third Father—who gets me next? When He is done with me, then what?"
"I am not so sure about that, either," admitted the doctor. "The third Father will keep you a long time; and as all the troops are his, there may be nobody to fight: but He'll make you a good soldier!"
Thus during these days, each in his own way was putting forth new growth; and now there arrived a morning when the son was to show how well grown he was and how faithfully things sown in him were maturing.
At breakfast for some lack of fine manners he received instructions from his mother. By wayof grateful acknowledgment, he laid down his knife and fork and stiffened his back against his chair and looked at her steadily:—
"I don't see what you have to do with my manners," he said, as though the opportunity had come at last for him to speak his mind on the family situation. "You've spoiled everything for us. You ought never to have been my mother. Mrs. Ousley ought to have been my mother." And then he looked at his father for approval that he had brought the truth out at last.
The doctor at the beginning of that utterance had started toward him with the quick movement of one who tries to shut a door through which a hurricane has begun to rush. Now without a word he rose from the table and grasping the boy by the wrist led him from the room.
As the door closed behind them, a loud ringing laugh was heard as though the two were going off to enjoy something together. Then another door was closed, and then there resounded through the silence of all the rooms a loud startled scream; not so much of pain but of bewilderment, of amazement, of grief of mind, of a puzzle in the brain. Then there were other sounds, other sounds, other sounds. And then one long continued sound—low, piteous, inconsolable.
The spring advanced; tide of new life overflowed the land. Dr. Birney and his boy were seen driving on all bright days: not toward the sick necessarily; sometimes they were on their way to a creek or pond to fish.
There was a tragic change in the doctor, and there was a grave change in his son. The father's face began to show the responsibility of handling a case that was becoming more difficult; on a landscape of growing things—growing with the irresistible force of Nature, how was he to arrest the growth of things in the nature of a child? And the boy was beginning in his way to consider the danger of too much devotion to a father, too blind an imitation of him. In his way he was trying to get clear hold of this problem of how to imitate and how not to imitate. Something was gone between them; not affection, but peace. Each was puzzled by the other, and each knew the other was puzzled. How completely they jerked shining fish out of the lucent water; but as each dropped his hook into the sea of character, neither felt assured what he might draw up. At times in the doctor's eyes there was an expression too sad to be seen in any father's; and in the boy's was the look of the first deterioration in life—the defeat of being punished for what he thought was right.
Late one cold rainy afternoon in April there were several buggies in Dr. Birney's yard, three of them belonging to physicians called into consultation from adjoining county seats. One of the phenomena which baffle the science of medicine had appeared on the doctor's threshold—the sporadic case. Long after an epidemic is over, by an untraceable path infection arrives. It is quite as if a bird that cannot migrate should be found unearned on the opposite coast of a sea.
There was little need of the consultation; the disease was well known, the treatment was that agreed upon by the profession; Dr. Birney himself was the most successful practitioner. A well-known disease, an agreed-upon treatment—but a rate of mortality.
Others came, not called: friends, neighbors, members of his Masonic order. During all these years he had slowly won the heart of the whole people, and now it turned to him.
The doctor watched the progress of the case like one who must now bring to bear the resources of a lifetime and of a life; who must cast the total of skill and of influence on the side of the vital forces.
As the disease ran on in its course, to him it became more and more a question of howthe issue would turn upon so-called little things, as the recovery of a patient is probably sometimes secured by merely turning him from side to side, from back to stomach.
It was his problem how to drop into one scale or the other scale of the childish balances some almost imponderable weight, as when good tidings arriving save a life, as when bad news held back saves a life; as when the removal of an injustice from a sensitive spirit saves a life; as when the healing of a wound of the mind in the very extremity saves a life.
He felt that before him now were oscillating those delicate balances, never quite in equilibrium: a joy dropped into one, a sorrow dropped into the other—some pennyweight of new peace, some grain of additional worry! The shadows collected on one side, sunbeams gathered on the other.
"Now then," he thought within himself, "now then is the hour when I must be sunlight to him—not shadow!"
He watched the look in his little boy's eyes; he noted the presence of things weighing heavily. There was a tangle, a perplexity, a tossing of the head from side to side on the pillow—as if to turn quickly away from things seen.
"Do I cast a light on him? Do I cast ashadow? Does my presence here by him bring tranquillity, rest, sound sleep? As he sees into me, does what he sees strengthen? Was his chastisement that morning a sunbeam? It had not struck him like a sunbeam; it had not fallen in that way! The chill in the house all these years—had that been vital warmth to him?"
There now came out the meaning of all that exaggeratedly careful training: the exercise, the outdoor life, everything: it was the attempt to develop robust health on a foundation not robust: everything went back to the poor start: each child had been born delicate.
At intervals during the illness there were bits of talk. One night the doctor rose from the bedside and brought a glass of pure fresh water and administered a spoonful and watched the swallowing and the expression:—
"Does it taste bitter?"
"Pretty bitter. You can't say that I didn't take your nasty old doses, can you?"
"Don't talk! You mustn't talk."
"I'd feel better if I did talk—if I could get it out of me."
"Then talk! What is it? Out with it!"
But the face was jerked quickly away with that motion of wishing to look in another direction.
Some nights there was delirium. Through the brain rolled clouds of fantasies:—
"... If I knew how it comes out between you and Mrs. Ousley...."
On these dark rolling clouds the father tried to throw a beam of peace: and it was no moment to hold back any of the truth:—
"It is all over!... There is nothing of it."
"I wish I had known it sooner: it bothered me...."
At another time more fantasies:—
"... Not on the cheek! You're no father of mine if it's on the cheek...."
At another time:—
"...Suppose I never grow up and Elizabeth does. How is that? I wouldn't like that. How do you straighten that out?"
"I can't straighten that out."
"Then I can't straighten it out, either."
"So young—so young!" muttered the doctor. "I was pretty old!"
One warm night the doctor walked out of doors. The south wind blew softly in his face, lifting his hair.
All round the house in yard and garden and farther away in the woods and fields everythingwas growing. It was a night when the earth seemed given up to the festival of youth: it was the hour of youth: of its triumph in Nature.
Little aware of where his feet carried him, he was now in the garden and now in the yard. And in the garden, low down, how sturdy little things were growing: the little radishes, the young beets, the beans—those children of the earth, flawless in their descent and environment—with what unarrestable force they were growing! Afterwards in the yard he passed some beds of lilies of the valley—most delicate breath of all flowers: how fragile but how strong, how safe in their unsullied parentage, in their ample wedlock!
All about the house the steady rush of the young! And within it—as a mausoleum—the youth of all youth for him—stopped!
Most obedient and well-trained and irresponsible Death! Thou hast no grudge against us nor bearest toward any of us malice nor ill-will! Thou stayest away as long as thou canst and never comest till thou must! Thou visitant without will of thine own! Quickening Death, that also givest to the will of another not the shock of death, but the shock of new life!
There loomed in the darkness before the doctor as he wandered about a true picture: an ancient people in an ancient land weighed upon by their transgressions which they could neither transfer to one another nor lay upon mother earth. So once a year one of them in behalf of himself and the rest chose an exemplar of their faithful flocks and herds, and folding his hands upon its head laid upon it the burden of guilt and shame, and then had it led out of the camp—to wild waste places where no one dwelt—"to a land not inhabited."
... And now he had sent away his son into the eternal with his own life faults and failings on him....
He turned back into the house—passed through the sick room—passed through his library, passed the portrait of his wife in her bridal veil—passed down the hall—knocked at her door and opened it wide and stood in the opening:—
"... My wife, I have come to you...! Will you come to him...?"
LIVING OUT THE YEARS
Anafternoon of early summer, at the edge of a quiet Kentucky town, on the slope of a grassy hillside within one of those dreamy enclosures where our earthly dreams are ended, the sunlight began to descend slantingly for the first time—as on white silvery wings—upon a newly placed memorial for a child. Across the top of the memorial was carved a single legend hoary with the guilt and shame of men and women of centuries long since gone. Beside the memorial stood a young evergreen as the living forest substitute of him sleeping below: it was of about his age and height. The ancient stone with its legend of atonement and the young tree thus brought together stood there as if the offending and the innocent had come to one of their meeting-places—and in life they meet so often.
Tree and mound and marble stood within an open enclosure of turf encircled at a score ofyards by old evergreens touching one another.
Early in the afternoon two of these evergreens had some of their lower interlapping boughs softly pushed apart, and into the open space there stepped excitedly a frail little figure in a frock of forget-me-not blue. Just inside the boughs which folded behind her like living doors so that she was screened from view, she hesitated for a moment and looked about her for the dreaded spot which she knew she was doomed to find. Having located it, she advanced with uncertain footsteps as though there could be no straight path for her to the scene of such a loss.
When she reached it, she sat hurriedly down, dropped her bouquet on the grass beside herself, jerked off her spectacles and pressing her hands to her eyes, burst into an agony of weeping. Long she sat there, helpless in her anguish. Once holding her hand before her eyes, she drew from her pocket a fresh handkerchief; she had brought two: she knew her tears would be many.
At last she dried her red swollen eyes and brushed back from her temples the long sunny strands of wind-woven hair; she put on her glasses and picked up her little round brilliant country picnic bouquet; and with quivering lips and quivering nostrils looked where she mustplace it. With tear-wet forefinger and thumb she forced the flowers apart on one side and peeped at the card pushed deep within within—"From Elizabeth."
She got up then and went slowly away, fading out behind the pines like a little wandering strip of heaven's remembering blue.
Later in the afternoon the sound of slowly approaching wheels sounded on the gravel of the drive that wound near: then a carriage stopped. A minute afterwards there appeared within the open enclosure a woman in black, thickly veiled, bringing an armful of flowers. Some yards behind her a man followed in deep mourning also, bareheaded, his hat in his hand at his side—the soldierly figure of a man squaring himself against adversity, but stricken and bowed at his post. They did not advance side by side as those who walk most in unison when they are most bereaved and draw closer together as fate draws nearer.
When she reached the mound, she turned toward him and waited; and when he came up, without a word she held the flowers out to him. She held them out to him with silence and with what a face under her veil—with what a look out of the wife's and mother's eyes—there wasnone to see. He gently pushed the flowers back toward her, mutely asking of her some charity for the sake of all; so that, consenting, she turned to arrange them. As she did so, she became conscious at last of what hitherto she had perceived with her eyes only: the happy little bouquet of a child left on the sod. And suddenly there fell upon her veil and hung enmeshed in it some heavy tears, of which, however, she took no notice. But she disposed the flowers so that they would not interfere with—not quite reach to—that token of a child's love which had never known and now would never know time's disillusion or earth's disenchantment.
When she had finished, she remained standing looking at it all. He moved around to her side; and they both with final impulse let their eyes meet upon the ancient line chiselled across the marble:—
"Unto a Land Not Inhabited."
He broke the silence:—
"I chose that for him: it is the truth: he has been sent away, bearing more than was his."
She looked at it a long time, and then bowed as if to set the seal of her judgment upon the seal of his judgment. And, moved by somepitiless instinct to look at things as they are,—the discipline of her years,—with a quiet resolute hand she lifted her veil away from her face. It was a face of that proud and self-ennobled beauty that anywhere in the world gives to the beholder of it a lesson in the sublimer elements of human character. There was no feature of reproach nor line nor shadow of bitterness, but the chastened peace of a nature that has learned to live upon itself, after having first cast itself passionately upon others; and that indestructible strength which rests not upon what life can give, but upon what life cannot take away: she stood revealed there as what in truth she was—heroic daughter of the greater vanished people.
She dropped her veil and turned away toward the carriage. He drew to her side and once—hesitatingly, desolately—he put his arm around her. She did not yield, she did not decline; she walked with him as though she walked alone. During all the barren bitter years she had not been upheld by his arm: her staff and her support had been her ideal of herself and of her people—after she had faced the ruined ideal of their lives together and her lost ideal of him. It was yet too soon for his arm—or it was too late altogether.
He withdrew it; and he continued to walk beside her as a man who has lost among women both her whom he had most wished to have and her whom he might most have had. And so they passed from the scene.
But throughout that long obscurity amid which we are appointed to pass our allotted years, it is not the order of nature that all stars within us should rise at once. There are some that are seen early, that move rapidly across our sky, and are beheld no more—youth's flaming planets, the influence of which upon us often leaves us doubting whether they were baneful or benign. There are other lights which come out to shine upon our paths and guide us later; and, thanks be to nature, until the very last new stars appear. Those who early have left them they love can never know what late radiance may illumine the end of their road. And only those who remain together to the end can greet the last splendid beacons that sometimes rise above the horizon before the dawn—the true morning stars of many a dark and troubled life.
They had half their lives before them: they were growing, unfolding characters; perhaps they were yet to find happiness together. Shehad loved him with a love too single and complete, and she loved him yet too well, to accept anything from him a second time less than everything. Happiness was in store for them perhaps—and more children.
The working out of this lay with them and their remaining days.
But for the doctor one thing had been worked out to the end: that year by year he was to drive along turnpikes and lanes—alone. That every spring he was to see the sower go forth in the fields; that with his whitening hair he was to watch beside the beds of sick children; and often at night under his lamp to fall asleep with his eyes fixed upon The World's Path of Lessening Pain.
When the two were gone, it was a still spot that afternoon with the sunlight on the grass. As the sun began to descend, its rays gradually left the earth and passed upward toward the pinnacles of the pines; and lingering on those summits awhile, it finally took its flight back to the infinite. Twilight fell gray; darkness began to brood; objects lost their outlines. The trees of the enclosure became shadows; these shadows in time became as other realities. The sturdy young evergreen planted beside theboy as his forest counterpart, having his shape and size, now stood there as the lad himself wrapped in his overcoat—the crimson-tipped madcap little fellow who had gambolled across the frozen fields that windy morning toward his Christmas Festival.
In this valley of earth he stood there holding upright for all to see the slab on which was to be read his brief ended tale:—
"Unto a Land Not Inhabited."
THE END