"That little foot," he said, moved to admiration, "that little foot makes the true footprint of the greater vanished people! She is of the blood of male and female heroes: she knows how to do and she knows how to suffer! Now if I fall in love with her—!" and there surged through him the invitation to do so.
But at the end of his first year the doctor felt that he had made only a general advance toward the long battle-line of Love; he had reconnoitred, but he had not attacked; he had a vast marital receptivity embracing many square miles. He had slid his hands along thenuptial rope, but he could not as yet discover who was waiting beside the bridal knot.
On the other hand, there were two or three cases of wounded on the other side; and if one could have been privileged to stand near, it would have been possible to see Love's ambulances secretly and mournfully moving here and there to the rear. If as much as this could not be said for him, what right would he have had to be practising there—or to be alive anywhere!
And now the winter of that first year had come: it brought an immense stride—in Progress.
It was the twenty-fourth of December. Darkness was beginning to fall on road and woods and fields; and he was driving rapidly home because he was tired and ravenous and because he was thinking of his supper—always that good Kentucky supper. But to-night he would have to eat solitary because some days previous his uncle had gone to New York—gone in his quiet way: announcing the fact one morning and stopping there—his reasons were his own.
About a mile from home the doctor's horse, rushing on through the gathering Christmas twilight, began to overtake a vehicle moving ata stately pace as though its mission involved affairs too elaborate for haste. As he approached from the rear he recognized that it was Frederick Ousley's carriage, returning from his afternoon wedding several miles across the country.
He had never met the girl that his friend was to marry: her home was in another neighborhood, and the demands of this first year upon him had been too many. He had not even had time to go to the wedding. Now he checked his horse in order not to pass the carriage, and at a respectful distance of a few yards constituted himself its happy procession. At the front gate it turned in and rolled through the woods to the house, the windows of which were blazing with candles—bridal lights and the lights of Christmas Eve! He stopped at the gate and followed the progress of it as it intercepted the lights now of one window and now of another as it wound along the drive. Leaning forward with his forearms on his knees and peering from the side-curtain, he saw the front doors thrown open, or knew this by the flood of radiance that issued from the hall; saw the young master of the house walk to the top step of his porch and there turn and wait to receive his bride—in true poetic and royal and manly fashion: wishingher to come to him as he faced her on his threshold; he saw arms outstretched toward her, saw her mount falteringly and give her hands; and saw them walk side by side into the hall: the servants closed in upon them, the doors closed upon the servants.
Christmas Eve—Night of Nativity—Home—Youth—Love—Firelight and Darkness—One another!
As the doctor watched, that vision sank into him as an arrow which had been shot into the air years before and had now hit its mark. He straightened himself abruptly and gave the rein to his horse with a feeling that the shaft stuck in its wound. Then with a vigorous shake of his head he said to himself:—
"Dr. Birney, there is a young man in this buggy who needs your best attention: see that he gets it and gets it quickly."
He found his supper awaiting him: and some intelligence which drove appetite away and drove him away, leaving the supper uneaten: it was a letter from his uncle—one of those tranquil letters:—
"They think they will have to perform an operation on me, but I want your opinion first. I trust your judgment beyond that of any of them, old and experienced as they are: and Ishould have sought your judgment before coming away if I could have felt sure that it would be needed: unless it were needed, I did not wish you to know. You had better start without losing very much time. They seem to regard the case as urgent and uncertain.
"If anything should happen before you are able to reach me, these few words will be my last.
"You have long since entered, Downs, into possession of part of what you will inherit from me: and that is your acquaintance with the imperfections of my character and the frailties of my life. There has been much in it that even a worse man might regret, but nothing of which any better man could be ashamed. You have always guarded this part of your inheritance as your sacred private personal property. My request is that you will hereafter make as little account of it as possible; I hope you will never be tempted to draw upon it as a valuable fund; and as early as time permits, put the memory of it away to gather its oblivion and its dust.
"You will find that everything of value I possess has been left to you. You think I have loved horses; I have loved nothing but you. I have loved you because you wereworthy of it; but I should have loved you if you had not been worthy. The horses meant a good deal to me in life, but they mean nothing in death.
"I believe you will be one more great Kentucky country doctor. And whatever race you may have to run in this world, whether you win or whether you lose, I know it will be a hard, a gallant, struggle: that is all the thoroughbred can ever do. Having delivered over to you everything I own and retaining only the things I cannot will away,—my judgment, my confidence in you, and my devotion to you,—I wager these that you will win life's race and win it gloriously. My last bet—with my last coin—you will win!
"If this is good-by—good-by."
It was several weeks before he returned, bringing with him all that was earthly of one whose races were over and who himself had just been entered for the unknown stake of the Great Futurity.
Now February had reappeared, and with it came another stage of Progress. When he entered the breakfast room one morning—always to a hearty breakfast—he went first to the windows and looked out at the low darkclouds shrouding the sky and the rapidly whitening earth: it was snowing heavily. As he turned within, the bleakness out of doors brightened the fire and added its comfort to the breakfast table. While he was pouring out his coffee, suddenly through one window an object appeared; and looking out, he saw Frederick Ousley on horseback at the foot of the pavement: he was but half seen, laughing and beckoning amid the thickly falling flakes.
The doctor rushed out to the porch, and young Ousley spurred his horse up to the side of it, riding over flower-beds, trampling and ruining plants that happened not now to be in bloom. The two friends after a long crushing grip poured out their friendship with eye and speech, greeting and laughter.
Two products of that land. With much in sympathy, with no outward resemblance: one of little mingled Anglo-Saxon blood: the other of Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon strains which have created so much history wherever they have made their mortal fight. The young Kentucky Anglo-Saxon on his horse, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with heavy body and heavy limbs, a superb animal to begin with, wheresoever and in whatsoever the animal might end: the snow on the edges of his yellowish hair and close-clippedbeard; around his neck, just visible inside his upturned coat collar, a light blue scarf, a woman's scarf, tied there as he had started by tender fingers that had perhaps craved the mere touching of his flesh: the scarf, as it were, of Lohengrin blue; for there was something so knightly about him, he radiated such a passion of clean young manhood, that you all but thought of him as a Kentucky Lohengrin—whom no Elsa had questioned too closely, and for whom there would never be a barren return to Montserrat.
Facing him, the young Kentucky Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon, physical equal, physical opposite: dark and swarthy soldier of the South: as he stood there giving you no notion that for him waited the crimson-dyed cup of Life's tragic brew, topped at this moment with the white dancing foam of youth and happiness.
They talked rapidly of many things. Then the object of the visit was disclosed—with an altered voice and manner:—
"As soon as you have had breakfast, Downs, I wish you would come over. Mrs. Ousley is not very well. She would like to see you."
Then he added with affectionate seriousness: "I have told her about you: how we have known each other all our lives, have playedtogether, hunted together, slept together, travelled together, studied together. She knows all about you! I have prepared the way for you to be her physician. There was a great difficulty there—that question of her physician: you will knowthat, when you knowher!"
A new look had come into his eyes: he stood as on the peak of experience—the true mountain-top of the life of this world.
"I will come at once."
Young Ousley, with a sudden impulse, perhaps to conceal his own sacred emotion, rode over to a window of the breakfast room and peered in at the waiting table with its solitary chair at the head. He raised his voice as though speaking to an imaginary person inside:
"How do you do, Mrs. Birney?" he said. "Could I speak to the doctor a moment? I should like to have his private ear professionally: could you pass one of his ears out?"
The doctor stooped and scraped together a snowball from the edge of the porch, and with a soft toss hit him in the face:—
"Take that for speaking to Mrs. Birney through a window! And Mrs. Birney is not my office boy. And I do the passing out of my own ears—to any desired distance."
The young husband rode back to the porch, wiping the snow out of his laughing eyes: they looked blue as with the clear laughter of the sky.
"That will never do!" he said with a backward motion of his head toward the solitary chair at the breakfast-table. "What right have you to defraud a girl out of all that happiness?"
"I am not defrauding a girl out of all that happiness: I am being defrauded. I am not the culprit: I am the victim. As a consequence of trying to save the lives of other husbands, I have nearly come to my own death as a bachelor: I have about succumbed to inanition: I am a mere Hamlet of soliloquy—and abstention."
It was the last playfulness of boyhood friendship, of a return to old ways of jesting when jesting meant nothing. But the glance into the breakfast room—those rallying words—the return of the snowball into the face—were the ending of a past: each felt that this was enough of it.
As young Ousley rode away, he wheeled his horse at the distance of some yards and called back formally:—
"Mrs. Ousley would like to see you as soon as you can come, doctor."
It was a professional command.
"I'll come immediately after breakfast."
"Thank you."
"Thankyou!"
They had assumed another relation in life: on one side of a chasm was a young husband with his bride; on the other, the family physician.
As Dr. Birney poured out his coffee and buttered his biscuit, he said to himself that now the bread of life was being buttered.
When he reached the Ousleys', the youthful husband met him on the veranda and threw an arm around his shoulder affectionately and led him in; and when some time later they reappeared, both talked gravely and parted, bound by a new bond of dependence and helpfulness between man and man.
For the next few days there developed in Dr. Birney a novel consciousness that his interest in marriage had enormously deepened, but that interest in his own marriage had received a setback: the feeling was genuine, and it troubled him. The tentative advances into social life that he had been making seemed to have ended in blind paths; the growing ties snapped like threads upon which some displaced weight has fallen.
What he had been looking for it seemed tohim that he had found too late in Josephine Ousley. Had he found her before her marriage, he would have looked at no other, nor have wavered a year. The actual significance of this was that he had encountered one of the persistent dreams of mankind—the dream of ideal love and ideal marriage with one who is unattainable.
The history of the race, of its art, of its literature, has borne through ages testimony to the vividness and to the tyranny of this obsession, this mistake, or this truth which may be one of Nature's deepest. For it may be error and it may be truth, or sometimes the one and sometimes the other. It may be one of the vast forces in Nature which we are but now beginning to observe—one of her instincts of intuitive selection which announces itself instantly and is never to be reversed: such an instinct as governs the mating of other lives not human. But there it is in our own species for us to make out of it what we can. There are men who for the rest of their lives look back upon the mere sight of some woman, a solitary brief meeting with her, as though that were their natural and perfect union. There are women who are haunted by the same influence and allegiance to some man—seenonce—perhaps never seen at all except in a picture. Among the dreams of humanity about ideal strength, ideal wisdom, ideal justice and charity and friendship, this must be set apart as its dream of ideal love; and as all high and beautiful dreams about human nature are welcome, provided only we never awaken from them, let those who dream thus dream on. But the tragedy of it falls upon those who in actual life practically supplant the imagined. Let Petrarch dream of Laura, let Dante dream of Beatrice, if only the perfections of Laura and Beatrice do not come into judgment against the actual wives of Petrarchs and Dantes. Let the ideal love of Romeo and Juliet gladden mankind only as a dream of the unfulfilled.
Dr. Birney had fallen under the influence of this error, or this truth: the bride of his friend instantly filled his imagination as that vision of perfection which dreams alone bring to visit us. He was not yet in love with her, not a feeling of his nature had yet made its start towards her: but she had declared herself as for him the ideal woman—ensphered in the unattainable. As proof of this she released in him from the hour of his meeting her finer things than he had been aware of in his own nature: her countenance, her form, her voice, her wholepresence, her spirit, disclosed for him for the first time the whole glory and splendor of human life and of a man's union with a woman.
As he tried to withdraw his mind from this belief and fix it upon his own separate future, he discovered that his outlook was no longer single nor clear. Something stood in his path—an irremovable obstacle. Sometimes in sleep we try to drive around an obstruction in our road, and as often as we drive around it it reappears where it was before: such an obstruction had obtruded itself across his progress.
During the following weeks he was often at the Ousleys'—to supper, as a guest in their carriage on visits and to parties: the three were almost inseparable. One night at supper young Ousley again brought up the subject of the doctor's marriage and twitted him for hesitancy: unexpectedly the subject was thrust back into the speaker's teeth: there was an awkward silence—very curious—
And now there befell the doctor one of those peculiar little progressions or retrogressions which prove a man not to be utterly forlorn. He had ceased to make social calls, and had begun to decline invitations; and so into the air there was wafted that little myth whichwent wandering over the country from house to house: the familiar little myth that he had been rejected. This myth of the rejected!—this little death-web wound about the unsuccessful suitor: every eligible man is as much entitled to one as every caterpillar to his cocoon.
He was with Mrs. Ousley when her child was born—he saved her life and the child's life and his friend's happiness. And in response he found that both of them were now drawing him into that closer friendship which rests upon danger shared and passed—upon respect and power.
The first day that Mrs. Ousley sat in her drawing-room with her infant across her knees the doctor was there; and as he studied the perfect group—husband and wife and child—it seemed to him that behind them should have shone the full-orbed golden splendor of this life's ideal happiness.
"There is only one way out of it for me," he muttered bitterly as he went down the steps. "I must marry and fall in love with my own wife and with the mother of my own children."
That afternoon he drove toward the stately homestead of the summer lawns and tennis matches—but when he reached the front gate, he drove past.
It was a few months after this, toward the end of a long conversation with Mrs. Ousley, in whichshenow broached with feminine tact and urgency the subject of his marriage, it was as he told her good-by that there escaped from him the first intimation of his love—unexpectedly as an electric spark flashing across a vacuum.
When he was miles away he said to himself:
"This must stop—this must be stopped: if I cannot stop it, some one else must help me to stop it."
That afternoon he began again his visits to the stately homestead of the lawns and the tennis courts; and a month or two later he drove by and said to Mrs. Ousley:—
"I am engaged to be married."
She gave him a quick startled look, thinking not of him, but with a woman's intuitive forecast sending her sympathy and apprehension on into the life of another woman.
One beautiful summer night of the year following there were bridal fights gleaming far and wide over the grounds of this stately country place and from all the windows of the house.
The doctor was married.
About a year later there reached Dr. Birney one morning a piece of evidence as to how hisreputation was spreading: from another neighborhood a farmer of small means rode to his door and besought him to come and see a member of his family: this request implied that the regular family physician had been passed over, supplanted; and when the poor turn against their physicians and discharge them, it is a bad sign indeed—for the physicians.
The doctor upon setting out sent his thoughts to this professional brother who had been discredited: he would gladly have saved him from the wound.
A few miles up the pike he was surprised to meet a well-known physician from the city: they knew each other socially and checked their horses to exchange greetings.
Dr. Birney lost no time in saying:—
"If you are on the way to my house, I'll turn back."
"I'm going to the Ousleys'. Professor Ousley asked me yesterday to come out and see Mrs. Ousley: he said it was her wish."
The two physicians quickly parted with embarrassment.
As Dr. Birney drove on he had received the wound which sometimes leaves a physician with the feeling that he has tasted the bitterness ofhis own death: he himself had been pushed aside—discarded from the household that meant most to him as physician and man.
He pulled his horse's head into a dirt road and crossed to another turnpike and visited his new patient and went on to another county seat and put up his horse at a livery stable to be groomed and fed and took his dinner at the little tavern and wandered aimlessly about the town and started back towards sundown and reached home late in the night and went to his rooms without awaking his wife. As he lighted his lamp in the library under its rays he saw a note from Mrs. Ousley to them, asking their company to supper next evening. His wife had pencilled across the top of the page a message that she would not go.
"It is their good-by to me," he said; "when my wife knows that they have discharged me, as a woman understands another woman in such a matter, she will know the reason; and she will see fully at last what she began to see long since."
When he went to the Ousleys', Mrs. Ousley came forward to greet him at the side of her husband, and she gave him both hands. And she did what she had never done before—she tried with her little hands to take his big ones—thehands that had saved her life; and out of the intensity and solemnity of her gratitude she looked him in the eyes until the lids fell over hers. It was like saying:—
It is not your fault, it is not my fault, it is not the fault of any of us: it is life and the fault of life. As I let you go, dear friend, I cling to you.
When the evening was over and the moment had come to leave, she was at the side of her husband again; and under the chandelier in the hall she suddenly looked up to it with a beautiful mystical rapture and consecration—as if to the mistletoe of her bridal eve.
And now more years—years—years! But what effect have years upon the master passions? What are five years to a master Hatred? What are ten years to Revenge? What are twenty to Malice? What is half a century to Patience, or fourscore years to Loyalty, or fourscore and ten to Friendship, or the last stretch of mortality to waiting Love? The noble passions grow in nobility; the ignoble ones grow in ignominy.
And thus it came about that the final stage of the doctor's Progress attained dimensions large enough to contain Hogarth's most human four: for it represented thatProgressof the Rakewhich sometimes in everyday reality coincides with theProgress of the Harlotand with theProgress of Marriage à la Modeand with theProgress of Cruelty: so that he thus achieved as much by way of getting on as may be reasonably demanded of any plodding man.
It was an August day in this same year which was now closing its record with the thoughtful days of December. It was afternoon, and it was Saturday.
Intervening years had developed the doctor in two phases of growth: he looked no older, but he was heavier in trunk and limbs; and he was weightier in repute, for he had established far and near his fame as a physician. He had patients in remote county seats now, and on this day he had been to one of those county seats to visit a patient, and had found him mending. As he quitted the house with this responsibility dropped, it further reminded him that within the range of his practice he had not for the moment a single case of critical illness or of any great suffering. Whereupon he experienced the relief, the elastic rebound, known perhaps only to physicians when for a term they may take up relations of entire health and happiness with their fellow-beings: andwhen you cease to deal with pain, you begin to deal with pleasure.
With a new buoyancy of foot and feeling he started down to Cheapside, the gathering-place for farmers and merchants and friendly town folk—most of all on Saturdays. As he strolled along, the recollection wandered back to him of how in years gone by—when he was just old enough to begin to shave—it was the excitement of the week to shave and take his bath and don his best and come to town to enjoy Saturday afternoon on Cheapside. The spirit of boyhood flowed back to him: he bathed in a tide of warm mysterious waters.
When he reached the public square, he began to shake hands and rub shoulders; and to nod at more distant acquaintances; and once under the awning of a store for agricultural implements he paused squarely before a group of farmers sitting about on ploughs and harrows. They were all friends, and at the sight of him they rose in a group, seized him and marched him off with them to the hotel to dinner whither they were just starting. They were hearty men; it was a hearty meal; there was hearty talk, hearty laughter. Middle-aged, red-blooded men of overflowing vitality, open-faced,sunbrowned; eating meat like self-unconscious carnivora and drinking water like cattle: premium animals in prime condition and ready for action: on each should have been tied the blue ribbon of agricultural fairs.
The hotel dinner was unusually rich that day because a great circus and menagerie had pitched its tents in a vacant lot on the edge of town; and there was to be an afternoon and an evening performance, and the town was crowded.
The doctor's dinner companions were to join their wives and children at the grounds, and very reluctantly he declined their urging to go along: as they separated, there rose in him fresh temptation about old Saturday afternoon liberties and pleasures—and there fell upon him as a blight the desolation of his own home life.
He made his way through excited throngs to the livery stable, and had soon started. On the way across town, above low roofs and fences, he caught sight of weather-stained canvas tents, every approach toward which now had its rolling tide of happy faces, young and aged. At a cross street the hurrying people flowed so thoughtlessly about his buggy wheels that he checked his horse lest some too careless childmight be trodden on; and as he sat there, smiling out at them and waiting for them to pass, suddenly above the tumult of voices with their brotherliness he heard a sound that made him forget his surroundings—forget human kinship—and think only of another kinship of his to something secret and undeclared: in one of the tents a great lonely beast lifted its voice and roared out its deep jungle-cry. The primitive music rang above the civilized swarm like a battle-challenge uttered from the heart of Nature—that sad long trumpet call of instinct—caged and defrauded; a majestic despair for things within that could never change and for things without that were never to be enjoyed. Shallow and pitiable by comparison sounded the human voices about the buggy wheels.
"To make one outcry like that!—sincere, free! But to be heard once—but to be understood at last!" said the doctor.
When he reached the outskirts of the town, he met vehicles hurrying in from the neighborhood and from far beyond it.
It was not long before he saw his own carriage approaching; and his children, recognizing him, sprang to their feet and waved tumultuously. As the vehicles drew alongside, he looked at them rather absent-mindedly:—
"Where are you running off to?" he asked, pretending not to remember that permission had been granted weeks before, as soon as the bills had been pasted on turnpike fences.
"We're running off to the circus!"
"And what can you possibly be going to do at the circus? Children go to a circus—who ever heard of such a thing! I should think you'd have stayed at home and studied arithmetic or memorized the capitals of all the States."
"Well, as for me," cried Elsie, "I'm pleased to explain what I shall do: I shall drink lemonade and sit with the fat woman if there's room for both of us on the same plank!"
"And what areyougoing to do?"
"I'm going to doeverything, of course! That's my ticket: I don't pay for all and see some! I'm going to do everything."
"Everything is a good deal," commented the doctor introspectively. "Everything is a good deal; but do what you can toward it—as you have paid the price."
For a while he mused how childhood wants all of whatever it craves: its desire is as single as its eye. Only later in life we come to know—or had better know—that we may have the whole of very little: that a small part of anything is our wisest portion, and the instant anythingbecomes entirely ours, it becomes lost to us or we become lost to it: the bright worlds that last for ages revolve—they do not collide.
He was still thinking of this when he met the carriage of Professor Ousley; and the two middle-aged friends, who in their lives had never passed each other on the road without stopping, stopped now. Professor Ousley got out and came across to the doctor's buggy and greeted him with fresh concerned cordiality.
"It has come at last," he announced, as though something long talked of between them could be thus referred to; and he drew out a letter which he handed in to be read; it was a call to a professorship in a Northern university. As the doctor read it and reread it (continuing to read because he did not know what to say)—as he thus read, he began to look like a man grown ill.
"You have accepted, of course," he said barely.
"I have accepted."
The friends were silent with their faces turned in the same direction across the country—their land, the land of generations of their people. This breaking up would be the end for them of the near tie of soil and tradition and boyhood friendship and the friendship of manhood.
"Well," said the doctor unsteadily, "this is what you have been working for."
"This is what I have been working for," assented Professor Ousley.
These intermediate years had wrought their changes in him also; within and without; he was grown heavy, and as an American scholar he had weight. The doctor clung for safety to his one theme:—
"You have outgrown your place here in Kentucky. A larger world has heard of you and sends for you because it needs you. Well done! But when I became a Kentucky country doctor, it was for life. No greater world for me! My only future is to try to do better the same work in the same place—always better and better if possible till it is over. You climb your mountain range; I stay in my valley."
Professor Ousley drew out another envelope:
"Read that," he said a little sadly, and sadness was rare with him: it was an advertisement for the town paper announcing for sale his house and farm.
"It is the beginning of the end," he said. "It is our farewell to Kentucky, to you, to our past, but not, I hope, to our future. Herbert and Elizabeth will have to be looked out for in the future: Elizabeth may refuse to leavethe neighborhood, who knows?" He laughed with fatherly fondness and gentleness.
The doctor laughed with him: that plighting of their children!
At this moment a spring wagon came hastening on: it was the servants of the Ousley household.
"So you have left your mistress by herself," the master called out to them as they passed. They replied with their bashful hilarity that she herself had sent them away, that she was glad to be well rid of them. As the wagon regained the middle of the road and disappeared, Professor Ousley looked at the doctor with a meaning that may have been deeper than his smile:—
"She sent us away, too—me and the children. She wanted the day to herself. Of course this change, the going away, the wrenching loose from memories of life in the house there since our marriage—of course, all that no other one of us can feel as she feels it. My work marches away, I follow my work, she follows me, the children follow her. Duty heads the procession. It pulls us all up by the roots and drags us in the train of service: we are all servants, work is lord. I understood her to-day—I was glad to bring thechildren and to be absent from her myself: these hours of looking backward and of looking forward are sacred to her—it is her woman's right to be alone." He drew the doctor into these confidences as one not outside intimate sacred things. The doctor made no reply.
He drove on now, not aware how he drove. A few more vehicles passed, and then a mile or two farther out no more: they had ceased to come: he was entering the silent open country.
A Kentucky landscape of August afternoon—Saturday afternoon! The stillness! The dumb pathos of garnered fields—that spectacle of the great earth dutiful to its trust and now discharged of obligation! That acute pang of seeing with what loyalty the vows of the year have been kept by soil and sun, and are ended and are now no more! The first intimations also of changes soon to come—the chill of early autumn nights when the moon rises on the white frost of fences and stubble, and when outside windows glowing with kindled hearths the last roses freeze. Of all seasons, of all the days with which nature can torture us, none so wound without striking; none awaken such pain, such longing: all desire offers itself to be harvested.
There was no glare of sunlight this afternoon,nor any shape of cloud, but a haze which took away shadows from fences and bushes and wayside trees and weeds, and left the earth and things on it in a radiance between light and shadow—between day and darkness. It was a troubled brooding: and when the surfaces are quiet, then begins the calling of the deeps to the deeps.
As the doctor advanced into this stillness of the land, there reached his ear, as one last reverberation, that long lonely roar of the great animal homesick and life-sick for jungle and jungle freedom; for the right to be what nature had made it—rebellious agony!
A day to herself! She had sent them all away, husband, and children, and servants! The right to be alone with memories ... under the still surface the invitation of the deeps....
Dr. Birney's buggy was nearing the front gate of Professor Ousley's farm. When he reached it, he checked his horse and sat awhile. Then he got out and looked up the pike and down the pike: it might have been an instinct to hail any one passing—he looked dazed—like a man not altogether under self-control. Not a soul was in sight.
He drove in.
The main driveway approached the house almost straight; but a few yards inside the gate there branched from it another which led toward the sequestered portions of the grounds. It was private and for pleasure: it formed a feature of the landscape gardening of earlier times when country places were surrounded by parklike lawns and forests and stone fences. It skirted the grounds at a distance from the house, passed completely round it, and returned to the main driveway at the point where it started. Thus it lay about the house—a circle.
Slowly the doctor's buggy began to enclose the house within this circle, this coil, this arm creeping around and enclosing a form.
In spots along the drive the shrubbery was dense, and forest trees overhung. He had scarcely entered it when a bird flitted across his path: softest of all creatures that move on wings, with its long gliding flight, a silken voluptuous grace of movement—the rain-crow. It flew before him a short distance and alighted on a low overhanging bough—its breast turned, as waiting for him. Its wings during that flight resembled the floating draperies of a woman fleeing with outstretchedarms; and as it now sat quiet and inviting, its throat looked like a soft throat—bared.
Once the doctor's buggy passed a flower-bed the soil of which showed signs of having been lately upturned: a woman's trowel lay on the edge of the sod: some one had been working there; perhaps some deep restlessness had ended the work. Here the atmosphere was sweet with rose geranium and heliotrope: it was the remotest part of the ground, screened from any distant view. And once the buggy curtains struck against the spray of a rosebush and the petals fell on the empty cushion beside the doctor and upon his knees. The horse moved so slowly along this forest path of beauty and privacy that no ear could have heard its approach as it passed round the house and returned to the main drive. Here the doctor sat awhile.
Then he pulled the head of the horse toward the house.
He reached the top of the drive. At the end of a short pavement stood the house. The front doors were closed—not locked. It stood there in the security of its land and of its history, and of traditions and ideals. Undefended except by these: with faith that nothing else could so well defend.
On one side of the pavement was built an old-fashioned ornament of Southern lawns—a vine-covered, rose-covered summer-house within which could be seen rugs and chairs and a worktable: some one had been at work; that same deep restlessness had perhaps terminated pastime here. Near the other end of the house two glass doors, framed like windows, opened upon a single stone step in the grass; and within these doors hung a thin white drapery of summer curtains; and under the festoon of these curtains there was visible from the doctor's buggy half the still figure of a woman—reclining.
She had bespoken a day for solitude. And now she sat there, deep in the reverie of the years.
Surely through that reverie ran the memory of a Christmas Eve when her husband had brought her home with him, and, leading her to this same bed-chamber, to a place under the chandelier from which mistletoe hung, had taken her in his arms; and as his warm breath broke against her face, his lips, hardly more than a youth's then, had uttered one haunting phrase:bride of the mistletoe.
Now had come the year for the closing scene of youth's romance in the house—aromance that already for years had been going its quiet way to extinction. The shorn group of them were soon to pass out of it into a vaster world: the young lover of the hearth had become the middle-aged lover of humanity.
And through the reverie ran thoughts of the other man who had been near during all this time—defrauded of her—his ideal; baffled in his desire; a man with a love of her that had been a long prayer and a madness: to whom she owed her life: this other man to be left behind here amid the old familiar fields—with his love of her ruining his home.
The doctor got out of his buggy noiselessly. He loosened the horse's check-rein without knowing what he did; and the surprised animal turned its head and touched him inquiringly in his side with its nose. He thrust his forefinger down inside his collar and pulled it with the gesture of a man who felt himself choking. He could not—for some reason—hear his own feet on the pavement nor on the steps as he mounted the porch. On one side in the shadow of old vines stood a settee with cushions; and at the head of it a little table with books opened and unopened: that same deep restlessness had ended reading. As he grasped theknob of the bell, it slipped from his hand and there was a loud clangor.
She stepped quickly out upon the stone before her door, and at recognition of him, with a smile and gesture of welcome, she disappeared within. The next moment the front door was opened wide; but at the sight of his face—with an instinct perhaps the oldest that the race knows and that needs never to be explained—she took one step backward. Then she recovered herself, and, unsupported, she stood there on the threshold of her home.
"Water!" His death-white lips framed the word without a sound.
He watched her pass quickly down the hall till she disappeared. Turning away, he sat down beside the small table of books in the shadow of the vines; and he fixed his blood-swollen eyes on the door, waiting for her to return. She came unwaveringly, and without a word placed the glass of water beside him, and then she passed out of sight behind him.
A long time he remained there. Close to his ear out of the depths of the honeysuckle came the twittering of a brood of nestlings as the mother went to and fro—a late brood, the first having met with tragedy, or the second love-mating of the season.
Then upon the stillness another sound broke—a plain warning to his ear. It was a scraping of the buggy wheel against the buggy, showing that his horse, finding its check-rein loosened, but being too well trained to move, had turned short to crop the grass beside the driveway.
How the homely things, the pitiable trifles reach us amid life's immensities!
This overturning of a buggy! The overturning of lives!
He started down the steps, and then midway between the house and the buggy he saw her.
She stood a few yards from him across the grass at one of the entrances of the summer house where she had been working at her needlework. She stood there, not waiting for him to come—but waiting for him to go. For years he had followed her as along a path: this was the end of the path: neither could go farther.
And now, turning at the end of the path, she meant to make him understand—understand her better and understand himself better.
And so she stood there facing him, the whole glowing picture of her wifehood and motherhood and womanhood: not in fear nor anger, nor with any reproach for him nor anystain for herself: but with the deepest understanding and sympathy in a great tragedy—and with her friendship.
Then she turned away and with quiet steps took a slender path which led to those sequestered portions of the grounds where she had left her trowel and geraniums and heliotropes. Slowly along this labyrinth of verdure, under the branches of the old forest trees, she passed. Now a shrub partly hid her: once the long bough of a rose tree touched her shoulder and dropped the petals of its blossoms behind her. Farther away, farther away, then lost down the dim glade.
The buggy crept homeward along the pike. The horse hung its head low; the reins lay on the dashboard; with its obscure sense that something was wrong it struck the gait with which it had always yielded obedience to the sadnesses of the land—and moved along the highway as behind a death.
Past farms of happy husbands and wives and children! Past fences on which, a bareheaded boy, he had once liked to come out and sit and watch people pass; or to meet his uncle as he returned home. Past the little roadside church, its doors and windows sotightly shut now during the week, where years before he had sat one morning and had shot the arrow of a boy's satire at the Commandment for men only.
Two voices for him that day—the same two that are in every man, the only two in any man: the cry of the jungle—Iwill—and the voice of the mountain-top—
Thou Shalt Not.
EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE
Fourmonths had elapsed since that August afternoon of summer heat and passion—not a lengthy period as reckoned on the mere unemotional calendar. But changes in our lives are not measurable by days: we may spend eventless years with no inner or outer sign of growth, and then some hour may bring a readjustment, an advancement, of our whole being. The oriental story of Saul of Tarsus, made a changed man by a voice or a vision of heavenly things, is human and natural, and for this reason if for no other has been credible to thousands of men—this reversal of direction on life's road.
As Dr. Birney now on the morning of this twenty-fourth of December sat in his library, trying to make out the bills of the year, and there lay disclosed before him the book of the years—the story of his life from boyhood up—he by and by abandoned the filling out of blanks against his professional neighbors andbegan to cast up as at the end of no previous year his own human debt to the better ideals of his fellow-beings—and to himself. And Nature, who was grievously in his debt but had no notion of paying, Nature stood at his shoulder and pressed him for settlement in that old formula of hers: you need not have opened this account with Nature, but since it has been opened, there is no closing it. It runs until you are declared bankrupt; and you are not bankrupt until you are dead. Then of course as a business firm I shall lose what I have not already collected from you; but there are enough others to keep the concern prosperous and going. Meantime—make a partial paymentnow: payment in suffering, payment in expiation, payment in self-repudiation. If you have any funds invested in a habit of inferiority, they are acceptable: I levy on them.
One particular fact this morning had riveted Dr. Birney's attention upon the slow inexorable grinding of these mills of life.
For years the unhappiness of his domestic affairs—the withdrawal of his wife from him under his roof—had by insensible stages travelled as a story to all other homesteads in that region. In his own house it had always remained a mute tragedy: each of the two whobore the yoke of it made no willing sign; each turned toward their world the unbetraying countenance. And it must be remembered that half a century ago and less you might have journeyed inquisitively through the length and breadth of that land and have found probably not one case of divorce nor of separation without divorce: among that people marriage was truly for better or for worse—a great binding and unalterable sacrament of blended lives. If after marriage love's young dream ended, then you lived on where you were—wide awake; if all gorgeous colors left the clouds and the clouds left the sky, you stood the blistering sun; if it turned out to be oil and water poured together, at least it was oil and water within the same priceless cruet: and the perpetuity of the cruet was considered of more value to society than the preservation of a little oil and water.
No divorce then nor separation in his case; nor any voluntary vulgarization of the truth, and yet a widely diffused knowledge of this truth among neighbors, among his brother physicians, in county seats, and away down on that lower level of the domestic servants, the proudest experience of whose lives is perhaps the discovery of something to criticise in thosefar above them: is it not a personal triumph to level a pocket telescope on the sun?
And all this Dr. Birney had grown used to through Nature's kind indurations: all of us have to grow used to so much; and perhaps there is no surer test for any of us than how much we can bear. But in one of life's directions only—in the direction of his children—his outlook had hitherto been as refreshing to him as sunlight on the young April verdure of the land. In that direction had still been left him complete peace, because there still dwelt spotlessness.
But the father had long dreaded the arrival in his children of an age when they must commence to see things in their home which they could not understand or in fairness judge. He carried that old dread felt by so many parents that by and by the children will be forced to understand—and to misunderstand—the lack of something in the house. It was for this very reason that permission had the more gladly been granted them this year to celebrate their Christmas elsewhere; for this festival brings into relief as nothing else the domestic peace of a fireside or the discords that mar the lives of those gathered in coldness about its warmth.
And now the long expected had arrived.His conversation with his little boy that morning before the two children had darted off for their Christmas away from home had brought the announcement: the boy was at last mature enough to begin to put his own interpretation upon the estrangement of his parents. Moreover, the son now believed that he had found the father out, had penetrated to his secret; and the doctor recalled the words which had conveyed this youthful judgment to him:—
"If I should get tired of Elizabeth and wanted a little change and fell in love with another man's wife—"
There was the snow-white annunciation! There the doctor got insight into the direction that a young life tended to take! There was the milestone already reached by the traveller! That is, his son out of devotion to him had already entered into a kind of partnership in his father's marital unfaithfulness. The boy had laughed in his father's eyes with elation at his own loyalty.
These tidings of degeneracy it was that so arrested the doctor on this day. The influence of the house had at last reached the only remaining field thus far unreached; and now the seeds of suggestion had been dropped from one ripened life into new soil, sowing the world'sharvest over again—that old, old harvest—of tares and tears. Hitherto his tragedy had been communicated to his own generation; now it had dropped into the next generation: it had been sown past his own life futureward.
The shock of this discovery had befallen him just when Dr. Birney had begun to extricate himself from his whole past; when he had begun to hope that it might somehow begin to be effaced, sponged away.
For although but four months had passed from that August afternoon to this December morning, a great change had been wrought in him.
When on the day following that sad August one he about the middle of the forenoon had driven distractedly into Professor Ousley's yard, he saw that friend of his youth, the man he loved best of men, the most nearly perfect character he knew among men,—he saw him sitting on a rustic bench under an old forest tree inside his front gate,—waiting for him. Beside him on the bench lay papers over which he was working—not because he enjoyed work at that moment probably, but because it was impossible to sit there and wait with empty hands—with his mind tortured by one thought, the sorrow and shame of this meeting.
As the doctor somehow got out of his buggy and started across the grass toward him, he did not look up because he could not look up at once; and he did not rise and come to meet him; it was impossible—for a moment. But then with a high bracing of himself—he came. And coming, he showed in his face only deep emotion, anxiety, distress, such as a true man might feel for another true man who had been caught in one of life's disasters. As a friend might walk toward a friend who from perfect health had by some accident of machinery tottered to him mangled; or as to a friend of wealth who through some false investment had by a turn of fortune's wheel been left penniless; or as to a friend of sound eyesight who had suddenly lost the power of right vision; or as to a friend who travelling a straight road across a perilous country had by some atrophy or lesion of the brain lost his bearings and was found wandering over a precipice.
"How do you do, Downs?" he called out, using the old first name which for years now he had dropped, the boyish name of complete boyish friendship. "Come and sit down," he said, and he wound his arm through the doctor's and all but supported him until they reached the seat under the tree.
And then, without waiting or wavering or looking at his friend's face, most of all without allowing him to utter a word (like a man aroused to the battle of a whole life which concentrated itself then and there), he turned to his papers and began to speak of the future—of the professorship with its new work, new duties, new services—to the going away from Kentucky: not once did he turn the talk away from the new, the future, except that when he finished he covered the whole theme by saying that the old ties must hold fast and become the dearer for the separation. He wanted the doctor's advice, insisted upon having it, forced him too on into this future. Not a word, not a look of the eye, not a note in the voice, about a thing so near, too near.
"Now this is the end of that," he said, putting the papers away. "But it all brings up something else: the farther we go forward, the longer we look backward; and the future, this new future, has turned my eyes all the more toward the past, Downs, our past—yours and mine!"
And so he began to talk about this past. He went back to their boyhood together. He laughed over the time when he began to go to the manor house every Saturday to stay allnight. He declared that he had expected the first time to starve in a house where there were no women; but to his astonishment—and relief—he had found that he had devoured things as never before. He had not been prepared to say—speaking for the boy he then was—that a woman at the table took away his appetite; but there was the fact, unquestionable and satisfying, that at the table with males only he had discovered bodily abysses within himself that had never been called into requisition! He was as frivolous as all this, winding quietly along through those happy years.
He recalled another incident: that during one of their first rabbit hunts they had fired almost simultaneously at the same rabbit. As neither could claim the glory of killing it, they had decided that at least they must share equally the glory of its pelt. And so, measuring to an equal distance from the tip of its nose and the tip of its tail, they had there inserted a penknife and severed the skin; and then, propping their boots, soles against soles, like those resolved on a tug of war, and each taking hold of his half of the skin, with one mighty jerk backwards each was in possession of his trophy! He was as frivolous as that. Nor would he ever leavethis theme of their friendship, weaving about it here and there remembered tricks and escapades as he traced it down—this bond in their lives. (There were such friendships in those days.)
And so he poured out a man's tribute to a man's friendship; and then quickly with a change of tone by which we all may intimate to a visitor that his visit is at an end, he bade the doctor take his leave. But he did one thing first—one little thing:—
"Josephine sent you these, and told me to pin them on you, with her love," he said with a tremor of the mouth, his eyes filling; and taking from the lapel of his coat a little freshly plucked bunch of heliotrope and rose geranium, he leaned affectionately over against the doctor's shoulder and pinned the flowers on his breast.
Then he held out his hand as if to drag the doctor to his feet, walked with him to the buggy, pushed him in, put the reins in his palm, and gave a slap to the horse to start it.
"Come to see us, Downs," he said; "we can't have you much longer."
Truly if the rest of us had nobility enough to treat one another's failings with sympathy andunderstanding, there would be few tragedies for us in our human lives, except the inevitable tragedies of nature.
The way in which these two friends instead of turning away from him instantly turned toward him, sparing not themselves that they might rescue him from what now might swiftly and easily be utter ruin—this most human touch of most human nobleness wrought in him a revelation and a revolution.
On one day he had gone to the end of the long path of temptation: there was relief in that even. And on the next what is finest in human nature had come to his rescue. And both of these things changed him. Every day since had been changing him. The unlifted shadow that had overlain the landscape of his life had begun to break up into moving shadows traversed by rifts of light: a ravishing greenness began to reappear in the world. That old irremovable obstruction across his road had been withdrawn: once again there was a clear path and single vision.
But the sower may become a new character; the growth of what he has sowed must go on. And the doctor with a vision clarified and corrected now saw thriving everywhere around him young plants the germs of which he had solong been scattering. A farmer might from a field by dint of infinite patience and searching recover every seed that he had thrown forth; but as well might he try to gather back a shower of raindrops from dry clods.
And as the doctor sat in his library that morning with this final announcement to him of how things sown were growing in the nature of his little boy, it seemed to him the moment to call upon Nature for a settlement—Nature who never fails to collect a bill, but who never pays one. And sitting there with the whole subject before him as a physician studying his own case, he asked of Nature whether without any will of his own she had not started him in life with too great susceptibility to the power of suggestion. Far back when his character was being moulded, had not Nature seen to it that wrong suggestions were sown in him? Had not all his trouble started there? Was notheharvesting what he had not scattered? This immeasurable power of suggestion, this new mystery which innumerable minds were now trying to fathom, to govern, to apply. This fresh field of research for his own science of medicine—this wounding and this healing, this waylaying and misleading, by suggestion. This plan of Nature that no human being shouldescape it, that it should be the very ether which all must breathe.
Meantime out of doors the face of Nature had rapidly changed; his forecast of early morning had been fulfilled: the wind had died down, clouds had overspread the sky, and it was snowing rapidly. On turnpike and lane and crossroads there was falling the dry snow of true winter when there is sleighing.
He had given up work and had long been walking restlessly to and fro from one room to another; and now as he stood at a window and looked out at the mantle of ermine being woven for all unsightly things, at the hiding away of the year's blots and stains under the one new spotlessness, his thoughts buried themselves with getting out his own sleigh and with his trip across country in the afternoon to the homes of the sick children. But more intimately he thought of the long drive homeward from the distant county seat late that night—with his memories of Christmas Eve.
He turned from the window, and going to his office set about the work of mending the sleigh-bells. For some reason he did this most quietly lest they should send any sound through the stillness of the house. Once as abell tumbled out of its place, instinctively he put his hand over it as though it were human and he must silence its mouth of merriment. Sleigh-bells seemed out of place in these rooms; they threw their music into old wounds. When he had finished, he put them just inside the door of the small room opening toward the stable where his man could take them away without making any noise.
And now another sound caught the doctor's ear as he was washing his hands.
It was half past twelve o'clock; and his wife had entered the dining-room to begin some early preparations for dinner, and she was alone. She wished no maid to-day, apparently, at least not yet; and as she moved familiarly about there reached his ear—very low, sung wholly to herself—the melody of a ballad.
The doctor knew it—words and music: it was theBallad of the Trees and the Master. In this the poet—a Southern poet who himself alike through genius and suffering had entered while on earth into the divine—in this the poet had represented the Son of Man as going into the woods when his hour was near; into the woods for such strength as the forest only may sometimes give us: the same forest out of which humanity itself had emergedwhen it began its troubled history of search for the ideal.
Thus her song was not of the Christmas Tree and of the Manger when Divine love arrives; but of the tree of the Crucifixion and of love's betrayal and sacrifice ere it goes away. It was not the carol of the whole happy world at this hour for Bethlehem, but the hymn of Calvary—the music of the thorn tree and of the Crown of Thorns.
And this from his wife on Christmas Eve!—not for his ear: not for any one's ear: but to herself alone.
As he listened, with an overmastering impulse he walked to the corner of the library and stood before her picture. He noticed that in the careless haste of holiday house-cleaning to-day the servant had left on the glass of the frame some finger-prints, some particles of dust. He brought a little moistened antiseptic sponge and a little red-cross gauze, and softly cleaned it as though he were touching a wound. Then he returned to the window and watched the snow falling and heard his wife's song through to the end.
It was she to whom he owed everything. It was she who, a few years after their marriage, having discovered herself to be an unlovedbride, had thrown her whole agonized nature into the one remaining chance of winning his love as young wife and young mother. Having seen that hope pass from her, she had withdrawn from one tragedy into a lesser one: she had withdrawn from him. And so withdrawing, she held the whole power of ruining him. Divorce—open separation—and his career as a physician in that land would have been ended.
Instead, she too had come to his rescue. Slowly out of that too swift and pitiless a fate for her own life, she had begun to work for the success of his: it was of too much value to many to be brought to nothingness for the disappointment of one.
The doctor stood there, looking out at the snowstorm and thinking how all the people who could most have destroyed him had spared not themselves to make him happy and successful and useful.
The dining-room doors were thrown open—he went in to dinner.
PART II
PART II