But, in that same Italy, northward are the Apennines; and sometimes in travelling through these or through the Swiss glaciers where Nature measures all things on the scale of the sublime—sometimes as your eye is passing from snow peak to snow peak, suddenly away up on some mountain-side you will see a human hut; and standing in the door of that hut a single humanbeing; and the thought may come to you that there, in the heart of that pygmy, may dwell sorrow that dwarfs the Alps.
The doctor's library had such a picture: it completed the story of the room, and it effaced everything else in it. In a somewhat darkened corner hung a framed photograph of his wife in her bridal dress made not long after their wedding. Once his photograph had hung beside it. The plaster where the nail had been driven in had either fallen out or it had been torn out. He never knew—he knew enough not to ask.
As for the photograph, there stood a young bride, looking into her future and trying to conceal from herself what she saw soon awaiting her: the life of a woman wedded but not loved. And there was recollection in the eyes too: that the man who had married her perhaps in the very breath of his wooing had wished she were another; that at the altar he had perhaps wished he were putting his ring upon another's hand; and that if there were to be children, he would always be wishing for them another mother.
The doctor sat there that morning trying to work at the books of the year. The rooms were comfortable; the children were away atthe fireside of another man's wife; the servants did not dare disturb him; his horses waited in their stalls; it was the day on which he could begin to reap his golden harvest—a pleasant day for most men; but he could not see the blanks before him nor remember the names he filled in nor the figures that were for value received.
Because there lay open before him the Book of the Years.
And coming down toward him on the track of memory through this book was his life from boyhood to middle age: first the playing feet of the child that have no path as yet; then the straight path of the boy; then the winding road of youth; then the quickly widened road, so smooth, so easy, of a young man; and then the fixed deepening rut of middle age.
And now the rut of middle age had come to its forks: north fork and south fork; or east fork and west fork—he must choose.
Whoso cares to know where and how the doctor's life-path started and across what kind of country it had run until now, a middle-aged man, he sat there this day at the tragedy of its forking, may if he so choose follow the road by the chart of a narrative.
But let him remember that this narrativegoes back into a society unlike that of to-day and into a Kentucky that has vanished. Back there are other manners, other customs, other types of men: a different light on the world altogether.
THE BOOK OF THE YEARS
Morethan half a century ago, or during the decade of 1850 and 1860, when American life on the fertile plain of Kentucky attained its ripest flavor, there was living with great ease to himself and others on a large estate in one of the bluegrass counties a country gentleman and farmer who was nothing more: nothing more because that was enough. Being farmer took up much of his time, and being a gentleman took up the rest.
He one day observed that his prolific heels were beginning to be trodden upon by a group of stalwart sons nearing manhood; or, in the idiom of that picturesque soil, all thickly bunched in their race for the grand stand. According to the robust family life of that era and people, a year or less was often the interval between births; and a father, slanting his eyes upward to his oldest who had just reached twenty-one, might catch a glimpse of a fourth son smiling loyally at him from the top of the rank stalk of eighteen.
This juvenescent and prodigal sire clearly foreseeing, as many of his neighbors foresaw, the emancipation of the negroes and the downfall of the Southern feudal system and thus the downfall of the Kentucky gentleman of the feudal soil, could see no further. When those grapes then ripening went into the winepress of destiny, there would be no more like them: the stock would be cut down, a new vineyard would have to be planted; and what might become of his sons as laborers in that vineyard he knew not, though looking wistfully forth. Therefore he determined to store them away for their own safeguard among those ancestral professions alike of the Old and New World that are exempt from political vicissitude and dynastic changes.
Now it happened that among his friends he counted the great Dr. Benjamin Dudley, the illustrious Kentucky lithotomist at Lexington; and taking counsel of that learned and kindly man, he chose for his first-born stalwart—since the stalwart when invited to do so declined to choose it for himself—the profession of medicine; and having politely packed his trunk, he politely packed him with a polite body servant and a polite good-by off to a medical school, the best the Southern Statesthen boasted—and the Southern States knew how to boast in those days.
But the colt that has been dragged to the water cannot be forced to drink; and the semi-docile son could not be made to introduce into his system his father's professional prescription. His presence at the medical school was evidence in its way that he had swallowed the prescription; but his conduct as a student showed that by his own will he had inhibited its action upon his vital parts.
In the year of finishing his course of lectures his father died; and upon returning home certificated as a doctor, he returned also as a young blood of independent fortune, independent future, and independent Feelings—the last of which, the Feelings, he regarded as by far the most important of the three. At the bottom of his trunk against the lining was his diploma, on the principle that we pack first what we shall need last.
The immediate use this golden youth made of his liberty and his Feelings was to take over into his control a share of the ancestral estate that fell to him under our American laws of partible inheritance; to build on it a low rambling manor house; and into this to convey his portion of the polished family silver and thepolished family blacks. Soon afterward with no exertion on his part he married him a wife in the neighborhood; tore up his diploma as if to annihilate in his establishment the very recognition of disease; laid off a training-track; and proceeded to employ his languid energies in a fashion which his father had not favored for any of his sons—the breeding of Kentucky thoroughbreds.
Years passed. History came and went its thundering way, leaving the nation like a forest blasted with lightning and drenched with rain. The Kentucky gentleman of the feudal sort was gone, having disappeared in the clouds of that history which had swept him from the landscape.
The mild young Kentucky breeder mellowed to his middle years, winning and losing on the road as we all must, but with never a word about it one way or the other from him; early losing his wife and winning the makeshifts of widowerhood, entering so to speak upon its restrictions; losing his little daughter and winning a nephew whom he adopted and idolized; letting him run wild over the house, and then about the yard, and then about the farm, and then across boundary fences into other farms, and then into the towns, and then out into the world.
There were parts of his farm that looked like English downs; and on these fed Southdown sheep; for the Kentucky country gentleman of that period killed his own mutton. (He killed pretty much his own everything, even his own neighbors.) No saddle of mutton out of a public market house for him and for his groaning mahogany. And so it seemed well-nigh a romantic coincidence that the fatherless, motherless boy who came to play on these downs should have arrived there with the name of Downs Birney.
The Kentucky turfman, with his Southdown sheep and Durham cattle and White Berkshire hogs and thoroughbred horses and Blue-dorking chickens, was born, as may already have been observed, with that Southern indolence which occasionally equals the Oriental's; and as more time passed he settled into the deeper imperturbability of men who commit their destiny to fast horses. Apparently they early become so inoculated with hazard as to end in being immune to all excitement. As he could stroll over his farm without having to climb a hill, he had perhaps preferred to build him a low manor house so that he could lounge over it without having to take the trouble to go upstairs. In the chosen business of his life itwould appear that he had wished to avail himself of a principle of Old Roman law: that he who does a thing through another does it himself; and thus he could sit perfectly still on his veranda with two legs and run nearly a mile a minute on a track with four.
A rural Kentucky gentleman of dead-ripe local pre-bellum flavor: exhaling a kind of Falernian bouquet as he dwelt under the serene blue sky on a beautiful bluegrass Sabine farm: a warm-visaged, soft-handed, bland-voiced man—so bland that when he strolled up to you and accosted you, you were uncertain whether he was going to offer to bet with you or to baptize you. Season after season this tranquil happy Kentuckian dwelt there, intent upon making nothing of himself and upon making the horse an adequate citizen of a state that likes to go its own gait—and to make him a leading citizen of the world: measurably he succeeded in doing both.
As he receded from view, his horses advanced into notice. He was probably never better satisfied with his stable lot and with his human lot than when at one of his annual sales he could hear the auctioneer—that high-gingered Pindar of the black walnut stump—arouse the enthusiasm of the buyers by announcing thata certain three-year-old had as its sire theImmortal Cunctatorand that its dam was the peerlessSwift Perdition. Year after year he dwelt there, contented in drinking the limestone water of his hillside spring with his foals and his fillies; drinking at his table the unskimmed milk of his Durham dairy; and drinking indoors and outdoors the waterproof beverage of a four-seasons philosophic decanter. The decanter resembled the limestone spring in this at least: that it could never rise higher than being full and could never be baled dry.
In the vernal season, as sole proprietor of all this teeming rural bliss, he sat on the top rail of a fence and witnessed the manufacture of the hippic generations; in summer sat on the top rail of another fence and saw his colts trained; in autumn in the judges' stand sat with a finger on his watch and saw them win; in winter, passing into a state of partial hibernation over the study of pedigrees, his fingers plunged deep in his beard, with comfortable mumblings and fumblings that bore their analogy to a bear's brumal licking of its paws.
A veritable Roman poet Horace of a man, with yearlings as his odes—and with a few mules for satires.
Surely possessed of some excellent Epicureanphilosophy of his own in that he could live so long in a wretched world and escape all wretchedness. If storms broke over his head, he insisted that the weather just then was especially fine; if trouble knocked at the door, he announced with regret from the inside that the door was locked. Is there any wonder that, nobody though he insisted upon being, his appearance in public always attracted a crowd? For the inhabitants of this world are always looking for one happy inhabitant. His acquaintances hurried to him as they would break into a playful run for a barrel of lemonade at a woodland picnic when they needed to be cooled; or as they waited around a kettle of burgroo at a barbecue in autumn when they wished to be warmed. Hot or cold, they felt their need to be sprayed as to their unquiet passions by his streaming benevolence.
Always that benevolence. On two distinct occasions he had placidly reduced by one the entire meritorious population of central Kentucky; and then with a clear countenance, had presented himself at the bar of justice to be cleared. Upon his technical acquittal, the judge had casually said that no matter how guilty he was, it would have been a much fouler crime to hang a citizen with so innocentan expression; that the habitual look of innocence was of more value in a homicidal community than a verdict of guilty for two fits of distemper!
If the world should last until Kentucky passes out of history into the classic and the mythological; if Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road should become Orion and the Milky Way; if the capture of Betsy Calloway should become the rape of Lucrece; if the two gigantic Indian fighters, the Poe brothers, should establish their claim to the authorship of those Poems and Tales which even in our own time are beginning to fall away from a mythical personage,—hardly more than an emanation of darkness, perhaps this unique Kentucky gentleman who insisted upon being no one at all will exhibit his beaming face in the heavens of those ages as Charioteer to the Horses of the Sun.
The sole warrant for here disturbing his light repose under his patchwork of turf is that he had taken to his hearthstone and heart an orphan nephew, whose destiny it was to be profoundly influenced by the environment of heart and hearthstone: by this breeding of horses, by the method of training them; by that serene outlook upon the world and thatgayety of nature which attracted happiness to it as naturally as the martin box in the yard drew the martins. Possibly even more influenced in the earlier years around that fireside where there was no women, no mother, no father, either; nor parent out of doors save the motherhood of the near earth and the fatherhood of the distant sky.
From the day when he arrived on that stock farm its influences began their work upon him and kept it up during years when he was not aware. But in his own memory the first event in the long series of events—the first scene of all the scenes that made his Progress—occurred when he was about fifteen years old. As the middle-aged man, sitting in his library that morning with the Book of the Years before him, reviewed his life, his memory went straight back to that event and stopped there as though it were the beginning. Of course it was not the beginning; of course he could not himself have known where the beginning was or what it was; but he did what we all do as we look back toward childhood and try to open a road as far as memory will reach,—we begin somewhere, and the doctor began with his fifteenth year—as the first scene of his Progress. But let that scene be painted not as the doctor saw it: more nearlyas it was: he was too young to know all that it contained.
It was a balmy Saturday afternoon of early summer; and uncle and nephew were out in the yard of the white and lemon-colored manor house, enjoying the shade of some blossoming locust trees. The uncle was sitting in a yellow cane-bottom chair; and he had on a yellow nankeen waistcoat and trousers; so that the chair looked like an overgrown architectural harmony attached to his dorsal raiment; and he had on a pleated bosom shirt which had been polished by his negro laundress with iron and paraffine until it looked like a cake of winter ice marked off to be cut in slices. In the top button-hole was a cluster diamond pin which represented almost a star-system; and about his throat was tied a magenta cravat: that was the day for solferinos and magentas and Madeira wine. But the neck of the wearer of the cravat was itself turning to a gouty magenta; so that the ribbon, while appropriately selected, was as a color-sign superfluous. On the grass beside him lay his black alpaca coat and panama hat and gold-headed cane and red silk handkerchief and a piece of dry wood admirable for whittling.
He had been to a colt show that morning several miles across the country in a neighborhoodwhere there was some turbulence; not the turbulence of the colts; and he had reached home just before dinner—glad to get there without turbulence; and the dinner had been good, and now he was experiencing that comfortable expansion of girth which turns even a pessimist toward optimism; that streaming benevolence of his countenance never streamed to better advantage.
He was reading his Saturday weekly newspaper, an entire page of which showed that this was a great thoroughbred breeding-region of the world. At the distance of several yards you could have inferred as much by the character of the advertisements, each of which was headed by the little black wood-cut of a stallion. The page was blackened by this wood-cut as it repeated itself up and down, column after column. Whether the stallion were sorrel or roan or bay or chestnut or black—one wood-cut stood for all. There was one other wood-cut for jacks—all jacks.
In the same way one little wood-cut in an earlier generation had been used to stand for runaway slaves: a negro with a stick swung across his shoulder and with a bundle dangling from the stick down his fugitive back; one wood-cut for all slaves. If you saw betweenthe legs of the figure, it was a man; if you did not—it was the other figure of man's fate in slavery.
The turfman read every item of his newspaper, having first with a due sense of proportion cast his eye on the advertisement of his own stud.
The nephew was lying on the grass near by, wearing a kind of dove-colored suit; so that from a distance he might have been taken for a huge mound of vegetable mould; he having just awakened from a nap: a heavy, rank, insolent, human cub with his powers half pent up and half unfolded, except a fully developed insolence toward all things and people except his uncle, himself, and his friend, Fred Ousley. He rolled drowsily about on the soft turf, waiting to take his turn at the newspaper: it was the only thing he read: otherwise he was too busy reading the things of life on the farm. Once he stretched himself on his back, looking upward for anything and everything in sight. The light breeze swung the boughs of the locust, now heavily draped with blossoms; and soon his eyes began to follow what looked like a flame darting in and out amid the snowy cascades of bloom—a flame that was vocal and that dropped down upon his ear crimson petals of song—the Baltimore oriole.
He liked all birds but three; and presently one of those that he disliked appeared in a fork of a locust and darted at the oriole, driving it away and then returning to the fork—the blue-jay. His hatred of this bird dated from the time when one of the negroes had told him that no blue-jays could be seen at twelve o'clock on Friday—all having gone to carry brimstone to the lower regions. After that he and Fred Ousley had made a point of trying to kill jays early Friday morning: a fatally shied stone would cut off to a dead certainty just so much of that supply of brimstone. He hated them even more on Saturday, when he thought of them as having returned. The one in the fork now was looking down at him, and, with a great mockery of bowing, called out hisFiddle-Fiddle-Fiddle: it was his way of saying: "You'll get there: and there will be brimstone, sonny!"
Of course he believed none of this legend; but suggestions live on in the mind even though they do not root themselves in faith; and memory also has its power to make us like and dislike. Presently, as he lay there stretched on the grass and near the edge of the shade, another ill-omened bird came sailing cloud-high across the blue firmament; and having taken notice ofhim,—a motionless form on the earth below,—it turned back and began to circle about him. That was another bird he hated. When a child he asked about it, and had been told that it removed all disagreeable things from the farms. He thought it a very kind, very self-sacrificing and industrious bird to do so. And he conceived the whole species of them as a procession of wheelbarrows operated across the sky by means of wings and tails. Afterwards, when his views grew less hazy on natural history, he lowered his opinion of the disinterested buzzard.
The third bird on which had fallen his resentment was the rain-crow: earlier in his childhood it had been told him that when the clacking wail of this songster was heard on the stillness of a summer day, a storm was coming. And he had seen storms enough on that very farm—tornadoes that cut a path through the woods as a reaper cuts his way across the wheat-field. But he saw no rain-crow to-day; you look for them in August when they haunt the cool shade-trees of lawns.
Altogether these three birds made with one another a rather formidable combination for a boy living on a farm: the one brought on storms that threatened life; the second gladly presided at your obsequies, if the opportunity weregiven; and the third was pleased to accompany you to the infernal regions with the necessary fuel. The arrangement seemed about perfect; apparently they had overlooked nothing of value.
Thus he had not escaped that vast romance of Nature which brooded more thickly over Kentucky country life in those days than now: a romance of superstitions and legends about bird life and animal life and tree life, that extended even to Nature's chemicals; for was there not brimstone with its story? As far back as he could remember he had been made familiar with the idea—rather terrible in its way—that there was a variety of Biblical horse which breathed brimstone. All alone one day he had made a somewhat cautious personal examination of the paddocks and stalls; and was relieved to discover that his uncle's horses breathed out only what they breathed in—Kentucky air. He felt glad that they were not of the breed of those Biblical chargers.
But then there was brimstone in reserve for a large portion of the human family; and with a perverse mocking deviltry he pushed his inquiry in this direction still farther. Without the knowledge of any one he had wasted at a drugstore in town his brightest dime for a package of the avenging substance; and at home thefollowing day he had scraped chips together at the woodpile and started a blaze and poured the brimstone in. Actually he had a sample of hell fire in operation there behind the woodpile! There was no question that brimstone knew how to burn: it seemed well adapted for its purpose. He did not take Fred Ousley into his confidence in this experiment: the possibilities were a little too personal even for friendship!
All this reveals a trait in him which lay deeper than child's-play—a susceptibility to suggestion. Even while he amused himself as a child with the shams and superstitions about nature, these lived on in his mind as part of its furnishings. Alas, that this should be true for all of us—that we cannot forget the things we do not believe in. To the end of our lives our thoughts have to move amid the obstructions and rubbish of the useless and the laughable. The salon of our inner dwelling is largely filled with old furniture which we decline to sit in, but are obliged to look at, and are powerless to remove; and which fills the favorite recesses where we should like to arrange the new.
There they were, then, that Saturday afternoon: the uncle with his newspaper and the nephew at that moment with his group of evil birds.
There was an interruption. Around the yard with its velvet turf and blooming shrubs and vines and flowers, that filled the air with fragrance, was a plank fence newly whitewashed. All the fences of the farm had been newly whitewashed; and they ran hither and thither across the emerald of the landscape like structures of white marble. Through the gate of the yard fence which was heard to shut behind him there now advanced toward uncle and nephew a neighbor of theirs, the minister of the country church, himself a bluegrass farmer. He was one of the many who liked to seek the company of the untroubled turfman. The two were good neighbors and great friends. The minister came oftenest for a visit on Saturday afternoons, as if he wished to touch at this harbor of a quiet life while passing from the earthly fields of the week to the Sabbath's holy land.
At the sound of the latch the uncle lifted his eyes from his newspaper.
"Bring a chair, Downs, will you?" he said in a cordial undertone; and soon there was a fine group of rural humanity under the blossoming locusts: the two men talking, and the boy, now that his turn had come at last, lying on the grass absorbed in the newspaper.
The men were characters of broad plainspeech, much like English squires of two centuries earlier: not ladylike men: Chaucer might have been pleased to make one of their group and listen, and turn them afterwards into fine old English tales; Hogarth might have craved the privilege to sit near and observe and paint; and a certain Sir John Falstaff might have been at home with them—in the absence of the "Merry Wives."
There was another interruption. Around the corner of the manor house a young servant advanced, bearing a waiter with two deep glasses well filled: at the bottom the drink was golden; it was green and snow-white at the top: a little view of icebergs with pine trees growing on them.
The servant smiled and approached with embarrassment, having discovered a guest; and in a lowered tone she offered to the master of the house apologies for not bringing three.
"This is yours, Aleck," said the host, holding out one glass to the minister. "This is for you, Downs. Now, Melissa, make me one, will you?"
"None for me," said the minister.
"Then never mind, Melissa. But wait—lemonade?"
"Yes; lemonade. It is the very thing."
"As it is or as it might be?"
"As it is."
"Lemonade without the decanter, Melissa."
While the servant was in the house, the uncle and the nephew waited with their glasses untouched.
The turfman was very happy—happy in his guest, in his nephew, in himself, in everything: his mind overflowed with his quaint playfulness; and when he talked, you were loath to interrupt him.
"Aleck," he said, rattling the ice in his julep, "don't you suppose that when we get to heaven, nothing will make us happier there than remembering the good times we had in this world? so if you want to be happy there, be happy here.Thisis one of the pleasures that I expect to carry in memory if I am ever transformed into a male seraph. But I may not have to remember. If there is any provision made for the thirst of the Kentucky redeemed, do you know what I think will be the reward of all central Kentucky male angels? From under the great white throne there will trickle an ice-cold stream of this, ready-made—and I shouldn't wonder if there were a Kentuckian under the throne making it. The Kentucky delegation would be camped somewhere near,though there will be two delegations, of course, because they will divide on politics. And don't you fear that there will not be others hastening to the banks of that stream! It is too late to look for young Moses in the bulrushes; but I shouldn't wonder if the whole ransomed universe discovered old Moses in the mint."
"Which mint?" said the minister, who kept his worldly wits about him.
"Aleck," replied the turfman, "I leave it to you whether that is not too flippant a remark with which to close a gentleman's solemn discourse."
The lemonade was served.
"Is yours sour enough, Aleck?"
The visitor found it to his taste.
"Is yours sweet enough, Downs?"
This hurt Downs' feelings: it implied that he was not old enough to like things sour. He replied surlily that his might have been stronger.
The servant, watching from inside a window, judged by the angle at which the glasses were tilted that they were empty: she returned and asked whether she should bring 'one more all around.'
"More lemonade, Aleck?"
"Thank you, no more for me—but it was good, better than yours."
"Another for you, Downs?"
Downs thought that he would not have another just for the moment: the servant disappeared.
The nephew returned to his paper. The turfman took from the turf a piece of whittling wood, split it, and handed the larger piece to the minister. The minister produced his penknife and began to whittle. In those days a countryman who did not carry his penknife with a big blade well sharpened for whittling as he talked with his neighbor stood outside the manners and customs of a simple cheerful land. And now the two friends were ready to enjoy their afternoon—the vicar of souls and the vicar of the stables.
The minister began to speak of his troubles—with that strange leaning we all have to let our confidences fall upon people who are not too good: the vicar of the stables was not too good to be sympathetic. It was all summed up in one sentence—discouragement about his growing boys. From the beginnings of their lives he had tried to teach them the things they were not to do; and all their lives they had seemed bent on doing those things. He felt disheartened as the boys grew older and their waywardness increased.What not to do—morningand nightwhat not to do. Yet they were always doing it.
Out under the trees the peaceful happy sounds of summer life in the yard came to the ears of the minister as nature's chorus of happiness and indifference. The breeder of thoroughbreds, as his friend grew silent, laughed with his peaceful nature, and remarked with respect and gentleness:—
"I never train my colts in that way."
"My sons are not colts," said the minister, laughing. "Nor young jackasses!"
"Yes, I know they are not colts; but I doubt whether their difference makes any difference in the training of the two species of animal."
After a pause which was filled with little sounds made by the industrious penknives, the master of the stables went into the matter for the pleasure of it:—
"You tell me that you have tried a method of training and that it is a failure. I don't wonder: any training would be a failure that made it the chief business in life of any creature—human or brute—to fix its mind upon what it isnotto do. You say you are always warning your boys; that you fill their minds with cautions; that you arouse their imagination with pictures of forbidden things; make them look at lifeas a check, a halter, a blind bridle. So far as I can discover, you have prepared a list of the evil traits of humanity and required your boys to memorize these: and then you tell them to beware. Is that it?"
"That is exactly it."
The youth lying on the grass laid aside his newspaper and began to listen. The two men welcomed his attention. The minister always found it difficult to speak without a congregation—part of which must be sinners: here was an occasion for outdoor preaching. The turfman probably welcomed this chance to get before the youth in an indirect way certain suggestions which he relied upon for his:—
"Well, that is where your training and my training differ," he resumed. "I never assemble my colts at the barn door—that is, I would not if I could—and recite to them the vicious traits of the wild horse and require them to memorize those traits and think about them unceasingly, but never to imitate them. Speaking of jacks, Aleck, you know our neighbor stands a jack. And he would not if he could compel his jack to make a study of the peculiarities of Balaam's ass. But you compel your boys to make a study of Balaam and his tribes. You teach them the failings of mankind as theyrevealed themselves in an age of primitive transgression. I say I never try to train a horse that way. On the contrary I try to let all the ancestral memories slumber, and I take all the ancestral powers and develop them for modern uses. Why, listen. We know that a horse's teeth were once useful as a weapon to bite its enemies. Now I try to give it the notion that its teeth are only useful in feeding. You know that its hoofs were used to strike its enemies: it stood on its forefeet and kicked in the rear; it stood on its hind feet and pawed in front. You know that the horse is timid, it is born timid, dies timid; but had it not been timid, it would have been exterminated: its speed was one of its means of survival: if it could not conquer, it had to flee and the sentinel of its safety was its fear; it was the most valuable trait it had; this ancestral trait has not yet been outlived; don't despise the horse for it. But now I try to teach a horse that feet and legs and speed are to serve another instinct—the instinct to win in the new maddened courage of the race-course. And I never allow the horse to believe that it has such a thing as an enemy. He is not to fear life, but to trust life. I teach him that man is not his old hereditary enemy, but his friend—and his master. I would notsuggest to a horse any of its latent bad traits. I never prohibit its doing anything. I never try to teach it what not to do, but only what to do. And so I have good colts, and you have—but excuse me!"
The minister stood up and brushed the shavings from his lap and legs; then as he took his seat he covered his side of the discussion with one breath:—
"I hold to the old teaching—good from the foundation of the world—that the old must tell the young what not to do."
"Aleck," replied the vicar of the stables with his quaint sunniness, "don't you know that no human being can teach any living thing—man or beast or bird or fish or flea—notto do a thing? you can only teachto do. If there is a God of this universe, He is a God of doing. You can no more teach 'a not' than you can teach 'a nothing.' Now try to teach one of your sons nothing! This world has never taught, and will never teach, a prohibition, because a prohibition is a nothing; it has never taught anything but the will and desire to do: that is the root of the matter. Do you suppose I try to keep one of my cows from kicking over the bucket of milk by tying her hind legs? I go to the other end of the beast and do something forher brain so that when she feels the instinct to kick which is her right, what I have taught her will compel her to waive her right and to keep her feet on the ground. That is all there is of it."
They were hearty and good-humored in their talk, and the minister did not budge: but the boy listened only to his uncle.
"Do you remember, Aleck, when you and I were in the school over yonder and one morning old Bowles issued a new order that none of us boys was to ask for a drink between little recess and big recess? Now none of us drank at that hour; but the day after the order was issued, every boy wanted a drink, and demanded a drink, and got a drink. It was thirst for principle. Every boy knew it was his right to drink whenever he was thirsty—and even when he was not thirsty; and he disobeyed orders to assert that right. And if old Bowles had not lowered his authority before that advancing right, there would not have been any old Bowles. There is one thing greater than any man's authority, and that is any man's right. Isn't that the United States? Wasn't that Kentucky country school-house the United States? And don't you know, Aleck, that as soon as a thing is forbidden, human nature investigates the command tosee whether it puts forth an infringement of its liberties? Don't youknow, Aleck, that the disobedience of children may be one of their natural rights?"
At this point the uncle turned unexpectedly toward his nephew:—
"Does this bore you, Downs?"
Downs remarked pointedly that half of it bored him: he made it perfectly clear which was the objectionable half.
The uncle did not notice the discourtesy to his guest, but continued his amiable observation:—
"To me it all leads up to this—and now the road turns away from colts to the road you and I walk in as men. It leads up to this: the difference between failure and transgression. Command to do; and the worst result can only be failure. Command not to do; and the worst result is transgression. Now we all live on partial failure: it is the beginning of effort and the incentive to effort. We try and fail; with more will and strength and experience we wipe out the failure and stand beyond it. Long afterwards men look back and laugh at their failures, love them because they are the measure of what they were and of what they have become. It is our life, the glory of more strength, the triumph of will and determination.It is the crowning victory of the world. And it is the road that leads upward.
"But transgression! No transgression ever develops life; it is so much death. You can't wrest victory out of transgression: it's a thing by itself—a final defeat. And what has been defeated is your last safeguard—your will. Every transgression helps to kill the will. It weakens, discourages, humiliates, stings, poisons. The road of transgression is downward."
He stood up, and his guest with him. As he lifted his alpaca coat from the grass and put it on, there was left lying his bowie-knife, and he put that on. It was the bowie-knife age.
"Will you come with us, Downs?"
Downs thought he would now read the newspaper.
"Where is Fred Ousley?" asked the minister of him, knowing that the two boys were inseparable.
"He has gone to a picnic."
"Why didn't you go to the picnic?"
"I wasn't invited: it's his cousins'."
"And haven't you any cousins who give picnics?"
"I don't like my cousins: I hate my cousins: Fred hateshiscousins: it's a girl that goeswithhis cousins."
"And what about a girl with your cousins?"
"Well, while you're talking, what about your sons and their cousins? We're running this farm very well, and we're all pleased. From what I have been hearing, it's more than can be said about yours."
The minister laughed good-naturedly at this rudeness as the two friends walked away; but the vicar of the stables observed mildly:—
"You gave him the wrong kind of suggestion, Aleck. It wasn't in your words exactly; I don't know where it was; but I felt it and he felt it: somehow you challenged him to employ his manly art of self-defence; and part of that art is to attack. But never mind about Downs. Now come to the stable: I am going to show you a young thoroughbred there that has never had a disagreeable suggestion made to him: he thinks this farm paradise. And the five great things I tried to teach him are: to develop his will, to develop his speed, to develop his endurance and perseverance, to develop his pride, and to develop his affection: he is a masterpiece."
In the green yard that summer afternoon, under the white locust blossoms and with the fragrance of rose and honeysuckle and lilac all about him, the youth lay on the grass beside the newspaper—which he forgot. A new worldof thinking had been disclosed to him. And he made one special discovery: that as far as memory could reach his uncle had never told him not to do anything: always it had been to do—never not to do.
And he was a good deal impressed with the difference between failure and transgression. He did not at all like that idea of transgression; but he thought he should like to try failure for a while; then he could call on more strength, tighten his will, develop more fighting power. He rather welcomed that combat with failure which would end in success.
He wished Fred were there. It was Saturday he came to stay all night; and the two were getting old enough to talk about their futures and at what ages each would marry. They described the desirable type of woman; and sometimes exchanged descriptions.
And then suddenly he rolled over the grass convulsed with laughter: his uncle was raising him as a thoroughbred colt. He approved of the training, but somehow he did not feel complimented by the classification. Fred would have to hear that—that he was being trained as for a race-course.
The next morning he was sitting in church; and the minister read the Commandments.
Hitherto he had always listened to them as the whole congregation apparently listened: as to a noise from the pulpit that drew near, lasted for a while, and then rumbled on—without being meant for any one. But this morning he scrutinized each Commandment with new thoughtfulness—and with a new resentfulness also; and when a certain one was reached he made a discovery that it applied to men only: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."
Why should not wives be commanded not to covet their neighbors' husbands? he wondered. Why was the other half of the Commandment suppressed? Moses must have been a very polite man! Perhaps there was more involved than courtesy: otherwise he might have found life more tolerable among the Egyptians: he might have been forced to make the return trip across the Red Sea when the waters were inconveniently deep. Those Jewesses of the Wandering might have seen to it that he was not to have the pleasure of dying so mysteriously on Nebo's lonely mountain: his sepulchre would have been marked—and well marked.
He sat there in the corner of the church, and plied his insolent satire. Fred Ousley must hear about the second discovery also—the Commandment for men only.
Then three years passed and he was eighteen; and from fifteen to eighteen is a long time in youth's life; things are much worse or things are much better.
It was one rainy September night after supper, and he and his uncle were sitting on opposite sides of the deep fireplace.
Some logs blazed comfortably, and awoke in both man and youth the thoughtfulness which lays such a silence upon us with the kindling of the earliest Autumn fires. Talk between them was never forced. It came, it went: they were at perfect ease with one another in their comradeship. The man's long thoughts went backward; the youth's long thoughts went forward. The man was smoking, at intervals serenely drawing his amber-hued meerschaum from under his thick mustache. The youth was not smoking—he was waiting to be a man. Once his uncle had remarked: "Tobacco is for men if they wish tobacco, and for pioneer old ladies if they must have their pipes. Begin to smoke after you are a man, Downs. Cigars for boys are as bad as cigars would be for old ladies."
The way in which this had been put rather captured the youth's fancy: he was determined to have every inward and outward sign of being a man: now he was waiting for the cigar.
He had been hunting with Fred Ousley that afternoon, and just before dark had come in with a good bag of birds. A drizzle of rain had overtaken him in the fields and dampened his clothing. The truth is that he and Ousley had lingered over their good-by; Fred was off for college. Supper was over when he reached the house, and he had merely washed his hands and gone in to supper as he was, eating alone; and now as he sat gazing into the fire, his boots and his hunting-trousers and his dark blue flannel shirt began to steam. He was too much a youth to mind wet garments.
The man on the opposite side sent secret glances across at him: they were full of pride, of a man's idolatry of a scion of his own blood. He was thinking of the blood of that family—blood never to be forced or hurried: death rather than being commanded: rage at being ordered: mingled of Scotch and Irish and Anglo-Saxon—with the Kentucky wildness and insolence added. Blood that often wallowed in the old mires of humanity; then later in life by a process of unfolding began to set its course toward the virtues of the world and ultimately stood where it filled lower men with awe.
September was the month for the opening of schools and colleges. The boy's education hadbeen difficult and desultory. First he had gone to the neighborhood school, then to a boys' select school, then to a military school, then to a college. Usually he quit and came home. Once he had joined his uncle in another State at the Autumn meeting of a racing association—had merely walked up to him on the grounds, eating purple grapes out of a paper bag and with his linen trousers pockets bulging with ripe peaches.
"Well, Downs," his uncle observed by way of greeting him, as though he had reappeared round a corner.
"Who won the last race?" inquired the boy as though he had been absent ten minutes.
Now out of the silence of the rainy September night and out of the thoughtfulness of the fire, the imperious splendid dark glowing young animal steaming in his boots and flannel suddenly looked across and spoke:—
"If I am ever going to do anything, it is about time I began."
The philosopher on the other side of the fire grew wary; he had given the blood time, and now the blood was mounting to the brain.
"It is time, if you think it is time."
"One thing I am not going to do," said the arbiter of his fate, as if he were drawing a surprisefrom the depths of his nature and were offering it to his uncle; if possible, without discourtesy, but certainly without discussion—"one thing I am not going to do; I am not going to breed horses."
The fire crackled, and no other sound disturbed the stillness.
"Some one else will breed them," replied the vicar of the stables, with quietness: the sun always seemed to remain on his face after it had gone down. "They will be bred by some one else. The breeding of horses in the world will not be stopped because some one does not wish to breed them. It will come to the same thing in the end. Even if it does not come to the same thing, it will come to something different. No matter, either way."
The young hunter had unbuttoned one of his shirt sleeves and bared his arm above the elbow; and he now stroked his forearm as he bent it backward over the biceps and suddenly struck out at the air as though he would knock the head off of an idea.
"My notion is this: I don't want to stand still and let my horse do the running. If I have a horse, I want it to stand still and let me do the running. If there is any excitement for either of us, I want the excitement. I don't careto ownan animal that wins a race: I wantto bethe animal that wins a race."
"Then be the animal that wins the race! The horse will win his races: he will take care of himself: win your race."
"I intend to win my race."
There was silence for a while.
"As it is not to be horses, then, I have been thinking of other things I might do."
"Keep on thinking."
"You might help me to think."
"I am ready to think with you; you can only think for yourself."
"What about going into the army?"
"You just said you wanted excitement. There is no excitement in the army unless there is war. We have just passed through one war, and I don't think either of us will live to see another. Still, if you wish, I can get you to West Point. Or, if you prefer the navy, I can get you to Annapolis."
"No Annapolis for me! I wouldn't live on anything that I couldn't walk about on and sit down on and roll over on. No water for me. I'll take land all round me in every direction. I guess I'll leave the sea to the Apostle Peter. Life on land and death on land for me. Hard showers and streams and ponds and springs—thatwill do for water. No Annapolis, thank you!"
"West Point, then."
"If I went into the army, wouldn't I have to leave the farm here?"
"You'd have to leave the farm here unless the Government would quarter some troops here for your accommodation. In case of war, you might arrange with the enemy to come to Kentucky and attack you where you would be comfortable."
The future officer of his country did not smile at this: his manner seemed to indicate that such a concession might not be so absurd. He did not budge from his position:—
"I'd rather do something that would let me live here."
"You could live here and study law: some of the greatest members of the Kentucky bar have been farmers. You could live here and practise law in the country seat."
"Suppose I studied law and then some day I were called to the Supreme Bench: wouldn't that take me away?"
"It might take you away unless the Supreme Court would get down from its Bench and come and sit on your bench—always to accommodate you."
"I don't know about law: I'll have to think: lawdoesmake you think!"
"There is the pulpit: some of the greatest Kentucky divines have been bluegrass farmers—though I've always wished that they wouldn't call themselves divines. It's more than Christ did!"
"The pulpit! And then all my life I'd be thinking of other people's faults and failings. A fine time I'd have, trying to chase my friends to hell."
The next suggestion followed in due order.
"There's Oratory; some of the great Kentucky orators have been bluegrass farmers. There is Southern Oratory."
"Oratory—where would I get my gas?"
"Manufacture it. It always has to be manufactured. The consumer always manufactures."
"If I went in for oratory, youknowI'd come out in Congress; you know they always do: then no farm for me again."
"That is, unless—you know, Congress might adjourn and hold its sessions—that same idea—to accommodate you—!"
"I'd like to be a soldier and I'd like to be a farmer, if I could get the two professions together."
"They went together regularly in pioneer Kentucky. The soldiers were farmers and the farmers were soldiers."
"And then if I could be a doctor. That's what I'd like best. To be a soldier and a farmer and a doctor."
"Men were all three in pioneer Kentucky. During the period of Indian wars the Kentucky farmer and soldier, who was the border scout, was also sometimes the scout of Æsculapius."
"Æsculapius—who was he? Trotter, runner, or pacer?"
"He set the pace: you might call him a pacer."
What a sense of deep peace and security and privacy there was in the two being thus free to talk together of life and the world—in that womanless house! No woman sitting beside the fire to interject herself and pull things her way; or to sit by without a sign—and pull things her way afterwards—without a sign.
The physical comfort of the night, and the rain, and the snug hearth awoke a desire for more confidences.
"Tell me about the medical schools when you were a student. Not about the professors. I don't want to hear anything about the professors.You wouldn't know anything aboutthem, anyhow: no student ever does. But what were the students up to among themselves at nights? The wild ones. I don't want to hear anything about the goody-goody ones. Tell me about the devils—the worst of the devils."
The medical schools of those days, as members of the profession yet living can testify if they would, had their stories of student life that make good stories when recited around the fireside with September rain on the roof. The former graduate and non-practitioner was not averse seemingly to reminiscence. Forthwith he entered upon some chronicles and pursued them with that soft, level voice of either betting with you or baptizing you—the voice of gambling in this world or of gambling for the next.
As the recitals wound along their channels, the listener's enthusiasm became stirred: by degrees it took on a kindling that was like a wild leaping flame of joy.
"But there always has to be a leader," he said, as though forecasting for himself a place of such splendid prominence. "There has to be a leader, a head."
"I was the head."
The young hunter on the opposite side of the fireplace suddenly threw up his arms and rolledout of his chair and lay on the floor as though he had received a charge of buckshot in one ear. At last, gathering himself up on the floor, he gazed at the tranquil amber pipe and tranquil piper:—
"You!"
There was a mild wave of the hand by the historian of the night, much as one puts aside a faded wreath, deprecating being crowned with it a second time.
"Another shock like that——!" and the searcher for a profession climbed with difficulty into his chair again. For a while there was satisfied silence, and now things took on a graver character:—
"Somehow I feel," said the younger of the men, "that there have been great men all about here. I don't see any now; but I have a feeling that they have been here—great men. I feel them behind me—all kinds of great men. It is like the licks where we now find the footprints and the bones of big game, larger animals that have vanished. There are the bones of greater men in Kentucky: I feel their lives behind me."
"Theyarebehind you: the earth is rank with them. You need not look anywhere else for examples. I don't know how far you got inyour Homer at school before you were tired of it; but there is theIliadof Kentucky: I am glad you have begun to readthat!"
The rain on the shingles and in the gutters began to sound like music. The two men alone there in their talk about life, not a woman near, a kind of ragged sublimity.
"To be a soldier and to be a farmer—if I could get those two professions together," persisted the youth.
"In times of peace there is only one profession that furnishes the active soldier: and that is the profession of medicine. It is the physician and the surgeon that the military virtues rest on; and the martial traits when there is no war. It is these men that bring those virtues and those traits undiminished from one war to the next war. There is no kind of manhood in the soldier, the fighting man, that is not in the fighting physician and fighting surgeon—fighting against disease. There is nothing that has to be changed in these two when war breaks out or when peace comes: their constant service fits them for either. In times of peace the only warlike type of man actively engaged in human life is the doctor and surgeon. Did you ever think of that?" said the older man, persuasively.
The silence in the room grew deeper.
"Tell me about the professions in the War: what did they do about it; how did they act?"
"The professions divided: some going with North, some going with South; fighting on each side, fighting one another. The ministry dividing most bitterly and sending up their prayers on each side for the destruction of the other—to the same God. All except one: the profession of medicine remained indivisible. For that is the profession which has but a single ideal, a single duty, a single work, and but one patient—Man."
The silence had become too deep for words.
The young hunter quietly got up and lit his candle and squared himself in the middle of the floor, pale with the sacred fire of a youth's ideal.
"I am going to be a Kentucky country doctor. Good night!" He strode heavily out of the room, and his stride on the stairway sounded like an upward march toward future glory.
The man at the fire listened. Usually when the youth had reached his room above and set his candle on his stand beside his bed, he undressed there as with one double motion of shucking an ear of corn: half to right and half to left; and then the ear stood forth bared in its glistening whiteness and rounded out to perfect form with clean vitality. But now for a long time he heard a walking back and forth,a solemn tread: life's march had begun in earnest.
He rose from his chair and tapped the ash out of his meerschaum. Through force of habit and old association with the race-course he looked at his timepiece.
"I win that race in good time," he said. "That colt was hard to manage, obstreperous and balky."
It had always been his secret wish that his nephew would enter the profession that he himself had spurned. Perhaps no man ever ceases to have some fondness for the profession he has declined, as perhaps a woman will to the last send some kind thoughts toward the man she has rejected.
After winning a race, he always poured out a libation; and he went to his sideboard now and poured out a libation sixteen years old.
And he did not pour it on the ground.
And now eight years followed, during which the youth Downs Birney became young Dr. Birney—a very great stage of actual progress. Seven away from Kentucky, and one there since his return. Of those seven, five in New York for a degree; and two in Europe—in Berlin, in Vienna—for more lectures, morehospital work, another degree. At the end of the second he returned incredibly developed to Kentucky, to the manor house and the stock farm; and to the uncle to whom these years had furnished abundance of means whereby to get the best of all that was wisely to be gotten: an affectionate abundance, no overfond super-abundance, no sentimentality: merely a quiet Kentucky sun throwing the energy of its rays along that young life-track—hanging out a purse of gold at each quarter-stretch, to be snatched as the thoroughbred passed.
A return home then to a neighborhood of kinships and friendships and to the uphill work which could so easily become downhill sliding—the practice of medicine among a people where during these absences he had been remembered, if remembered at all, as the wildest youth in the country. When it had been learned what profession he had chosen, the prediction had been made that within a year Downs would reduce the mortality of the neighborhood to normal—one to every inhabitant!
But at the end of this first year of undertaking to convert ridicule into acceptance of himself as a stable health officer and confidential health guardian, he was able to say thathe had made a good start: neighbors have long memories about a budding physician's first cases—when he fails. Young Dr. Birney had not failed, because none of his cases had been important: when there was danger, it was considered safe to avoid the doctor: the only way in which he could have lost a patient would have been to murder one! Thus he had entered auspiciously upon the long art and science of securing patients. But he had secured no wife! And he greatly preferred one impossible wife to all possible patients. That problem meantime had been pressing him sorely.
The womanless house in which he had been reared and his boyhood on a stock farm had rendered him rather shy of girls and kept him much apart from the society of the neighborhood. Nevertheless even in Europe before his return—with the certainty of marriage before him—he had recalled two or three juvenile perturbations, and he had resolved upon arrival to follow these clues and ascertain what changes seven years had wrought in them. There was no difficulty in following the clues a few weeks after getting back to Kentucky: they led in each case to the door of a growing young family: and out of these households he thereupon began to receive calls for his services to sick children:all the perturbations had become volcanoes, and were now on their way to become extinct craters.
So he was clueless. He must make his own clues and then follow. Nor could there be any dallying, since he could not hope to succeed in his profession as a young unmarried physician: thus pressure from without equalled pressure from within.
Moreover, he was pleasantly conscious of a general commotion of part of the population toward him with reference to life's romance. The girls of that race and land were much too healthy and normally imaginative not to feel the impact of the arrival of a young doctor—who was going to ask one of them to marry him. As to those seven years of his in New York and Europe, he could discover only one mind in them: they deplored his absence not because they had missedhim, but because he had missedthem: it was no gain to have been in New York and Berlin and Vienna if you lost Kentucky! He gradually acquired the feeling that if in addition to the misfortune of having been absent for several years, the calamity had been his of having been born abroad, it would not have been permitted him to plough corn.
But while they could not abet him in theerror of thinking that he had returned a cosmopolitan, bringing high prestige, instantly they showed general excitement that he—one of themselves—was at home again in search of a wife. He had arrived like a starving bee released in a ripe vineyard; and for a while he could only whirl about, distracted by indecision as to what cluster of grapes he should settle on: not that the grapes did not have something to say as to the privilege of alighting. After the bee had selected the bunch, the bunch selected the bee. A vineyard ripe to be gathered—and being gathered! Every month or so a vine disappeared—claimed for Love's vintage—stored away in Love's cellar.
They were everywhere! As he drove widely about the country, the two most abundant characteristics seemed to be unequalled grass and marriageable girls. He met them on turnpikes and lanes—in leafy woods at picnics—at moonlight dances—on velvet lawns—amid the roses of old gardens—and he began humorously to count those who looked available. One passed him on the road one day, and, lifting a corner of the buggy curtain, she peeped back at him: "She will do!" he said. Another swept past him on horseback and looked in the opposite direction. "She will do!" he said.He met two on a shady street of a quiet town under their peach-blow parasols: "They will do!" he said. He saw four on a lawn playing tennis, and watched their vital abandon and tasted their cup: "They will do!" he said. He swept his eyes over a ball-room one night: "They will all do!" he said, and made an end of counting.
Into this world of romance and bride-seeking the doctor launched himself formally under brilliant auspices of earth and sky and people one beautiful afternoon of early summer: it was on the grounds of one of the finest old country places at a lawn party with tennis matches. It was his first appearance as a candidate for life's greater game. A large gallery of onlookers, seated along a trellis of vines and roses, measured him critically as he stepped out on the court: he knew it and he challenged the criticism. In his white flannels; his big bared head covered with curling black hair; his neck half bare in its virile strength; his big grayish blue eyes flashing with glorious health, full of good humor and of deeper warmth; his big half-bared arms strong to hold in love or to lift in pain; the big stub nose of tenacity; the big red mouth that laughing revealed the big thick white teeth, good to tear and grind their way:his twenty-six years of native Kentucky insolence capped with a consciousness of travel and knowledge of his own authority and power—youthful white soldier of the clean,—the neighborhood's evangelist of life and death,—he looked like a good partner for the afternoon or for life. One girl, seeing all this—and more—repeated to herself, she did not know why, Blake's poem on the Tiger.
His partner that afternoon was his hostess—a Kentucky girl just home from her Northern college as a graduate. She too had been away for several years; and they had this in common as the first bond—that they had arrived as comparative strangers and saw their home surroundings from the outside: they spoke of it: it introduced them.
There was tension in the play for this reason; and for others: this first public appearance with so much going on in imagination and sympathy. Too great tension developed as the battle of the racquets went on: so that the doctor's partner, overreaching and twisting, sprained an ankle, and the games ended for them: she was assisted upstairs, and he applied his skill and his treatment.
As he drove home he thought a good deal of his partner: of her proud reserve toward himout of the game and of her inseparable blending of herself with him in the game; her devotion to their common cause; her will not that she should win but that both should win; her unruffled ignoring of a bad play of his or a bad play of her own; the freshened energy of her attack after a reverse; her matter-of-course pleasure when he played well or when she played well; the complete surrender of herself to him for the game—after which instantly there was nothing between them except the courtesy of a hostess. He thought of these traits. And then he recalled her fortitude during the acute suffering with that twisted ankle! How contemptuously she had borne pain!