"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 are you going to do?"
"I'm going to do everything, 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 anything becomes 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 leave the 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 the children 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 outstretched arms; 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 – a romance 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 the knob 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 any stain 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 so tightly 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 – I will– and the voice of the mountain-top —
Thou Shalt Not
V
EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE
Four months 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 and began 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 payment now: 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 who bore 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 those far 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's harvest 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 all night. 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 leave this 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 and understanding, 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 so long 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 not he harvesting 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 should escape 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.