The Doctor's Christmas Eve

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.

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 a bell 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 the Ballad 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 emerged when 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 unloved bride, 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

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