WHEN A FATHER FINDS OUT ABOUT A SON

Christmas had passed, bringing up the train of its predecessors—the merry and sad parade of the years.

It departed a little changed, and it left the whole world a little changed by the new work of new children—by that innumerable army of the young who are ever usurping the earth from the old; who successively refashion it in their own image, and in turn growing old themselves leave it to the young again to refashion still further: leaving it always to the child, the destroyer and saviour of the race.

And yet it is the Child that amid all changes believes that it will escape all change.

Christmas had passed, and human nature had settled once more to routine and commonplace, starting to travel across another restful desert of ordinary days before it should reach another exhausting oasis of the unusual. The young broke or threw away or forgot their toys; the old lifted once more to their backs familiar burdens with a kind of fretful or patient liking for them.

The sun began to return with his fresh and ancient smiling. For a while after Christmas snows were deeper and dryer, but then began to fall more rarely and melt more swiftly. February turned its unfinished work over to March, and March received it, and among other things brought to its service winds and daffodils. The last flakes of snow as they sank through the sod passed the snowdrop pushing upward—the passing of the snowdrops of winter and of spring. In the woods wherever there was mistletoe—that undying pledge of verdure into which naturalists of old believed that the whole spirit of the tree had retreated for safety from the storm—wherever there was mistletoe, it began to withdraw from sight and hide itself amid young leaves bursting forth everywhere—universal annunciation that what had seemed dead yet lived. Out of the ground things sprouted and rose that had never lived before; but on old stocks also, as on the tops of old trees about the doctor's house, equally there was spring. For while there is life, there is youth; and as long as there is youth, there is growth. Life is youth, wholly youth; and death is not the end of age nor of old age, but only the ending of youth: of briefer youth or extended youth, but always of youth.

Ploughing began in the Kentucky fields, and after the plough the sower went forth to sow. Dr. Birney as he drove along turnpikes and lanes looked out of his buggy and saw him. Beside him was his son, and the doctor was busy sowing also, sowing the seeds of right suggestion. Sometimes they met child patients whom the doctor had brought through the epidemic, they stopped and chatted triumphantly.

Altogether it was springtime for the doctor for more reasons than one. There was a change in him. He looked younger and he was younger. The weight as of a glacier had melted away from him. A new verdure of joy started forth. The beauty and happiness of the country about him found counterpart and response in his own nature.

One day as the two were driving across a fine growing landscape the doctor was trying to impart a larger idea of service; and so he was saying that there were three fathers: he was the first father—to be looked to for counsel and guidance and protection: this father was to be served loyally; he must be fought for if there were need, died for. But by and by the first father would step aside and a second take his place, much greater, more powerful—the fatherland. For this second father also his listener must be ready to fight, to die; he must look to it for guidance and safety. Then again in time the second father would disappear and the third Father would take him in hand—the Father of all things.

"And then I'll have to fight and die for the third Father."

"I am not so sure about the fighting and the dying," said the doctor with a quick, happy laugh.

"And after the third Father—who gets me next? When He is done with me, then what?"

"I am not so sure about that, either," admitted the doctor. "The third Father will keep you a long time; and as all the troops are his, there may be nobody to fight: but He'll make you a good soldier!"

---

Thus during these days, each in his own way was putting forth new growth; and now there arrived a morning when the son was to show how well grown he was and how faithfully things sown in him were maturing.

At breakfast for some lack of fine manners he received instructions from his mother. By way of grateful acknowledgment, he laid down his knife and fork and stiffened his back against his chair and looked at her steadily:—

"I don't see what you have to do with my manners," he said, as though the opportunity had come at last for him to speak his mind on the family situation. "You've spoiled everything for us. You ought never to have been my mother. Mrs. Ousley ought to have been my mother." And then he looked at his father for approval that he had brought the truth out at last.

The doctor at the beginning of that utterance had started toward him with the quick movement of one who tries to shut a door through which a hurricane has begun to rush. Now without a word he rose from the table and grasping the boy by the wrist led him from the room.

As the door closed behind them, a loud ringing laugh was heard as though the two were going off to enjoy something together. Then another door was closed, and then there resounded through the silence of all the rooms a loud startled scream; not so much of pain but of bewilderment, of amazement, of grief of mind, of a puzzle in the brain. Then there were other sounds, other sounds, other sounds. And then one long continued sound—low, piteous, inconsolable.

The spring advanced; tide of new life overflowed the land. Dr. Birney and his boy were seen driving on all bright days: not toward the sick necessarily; sometimes they were on their way to a creek or pond to fish.

There was a tragic change in the doctor, and there was a grave change in his son. The father's face began to show the responsibility of handling a case that was becoming more difficult; on a landscape of growing things—growing with the irresistible force of Nature, how was he to arrest the growth of things in the nature of a child? And the boy was beginning in his way to consider the danger of too much devotion to a father, too blind an imitation of him. In his way he was trying to get clear hold of this problem of how to imitate and how not to imitate. Something was gone between them; not affection, but peace. Each was puzzled by the other, and each knew the other was puzzled. How completely they jerked shining fish out of the lucent water; but as each dropped his hook into the sea of character, neither felt assured what he might draw up. At times in the doctor's eyes there was an expression too sad to be seen in any father's; and in the boy's was the look of the first deterioration in life—the defeat of being punished for what he thought was right.

Late one cold rainy afternoon in April there were several buggies in Dr. Birney's yard, three of them belonging to physicians called into consultation from adjoining county seats. One of the phenomena which baffle the science of medicine had appeared on the doctor's threshold—the sporadic case. Long after an epidemic is over, by an untraceable path infection arrives. It is quite as if a bird that cannot migrate should be found unearned on the opposite coast of a sea.

There was little need of the consultation; the disease was well known, the treatment was that agreed upon by the profession; Dr. Birney himself was the most successful practitioner. A well-known disease, an agreed-upon treatment—but a rate of mortality.

Others came, not called: friends, neighbors, members of his Masonic order. During all these years he had slowly won the heart of the whole people, and now it turned to him.

---

The doctor watched the progress of the case like one who must now bring to bear the resources of a lifetime and of a life; who must cast the total of skill and of influence on the side of the vital forces.

As the disease ran on in its course, to him it became more and more a question of how the issue would turn upon so-called little things, as the recovery of a patient is probably sometimes secured by merely turning him from side to side, from back to stomach.

It was his problem how to drop into one scale or the other scale of the childish balances some almost imponderable weight, as when good tidings arriving save a life, as when bad news held back saves a life; as when the removal of an injustice from a sensitive spirit saves a life; as when the healing of a wound of the mind in the very extremity saves a life.

He felt that before him now were oscillating those delicate balances, never quite in equilibrium: a joy dropped into one, a sorrow dropped into the other—some pennyweight of new peace, some grain of additional worry! The shadows collected on one side, sunbeams gathered on the other.

"Now then," he thought within himself, "now then is the hour when I must be sunlight to him—not shadow!"

He watched the look in his little boy's eyes; he noted the presence of things weighing heavily. There was a tangle, a perplexity, a tossing of the head from side to side on the pillow—as if to turn quickly away from things seen.

"Do I cast a light on him? Do I cast a shadow? Does my presence here by him bring tranquillity, rest, sound sleep? As he sees into me, does what he sees strengthen? Was his chastisement that morning a sunbeam? It had not struck him like a sunbeam; it had not fallen in that way! The chill in the house all these years—had that been vital warmth to him?"

There now came out the meaning of all that exaggeratedly careful training: the exercise, the outdoor life, everything: it was the attempt to develop robust health on a foundation not robust: everything went back to the poor start: each child had been born delicate.

At intervals during the illness there were bits of talk. One night the doctor rose from the bedside and brought a glass of pure fresh water and administered a spoonful and watched the swallowing and the expression:—

"Does it taste bitter?"

"Pretty bitter. You can't say that I didn't take your nasty old doses, can you?"

"Don't talk! You mustn't talk."

"I'd feel better if I did talk—if I could get it out of me."

"Then talk! What is it? Out with it!"

But the face was jerked quickly away with that motion of wishing to look in another direction.

Some nights there was delirium. Through the brain rolled clouds of fantasies:—

"... If I knew how it comes out between you and Mrs. Ousley...."

On these dark rolling clouds the father tried to throw a beam of peace: and it was no moment to hold back any of the truth:—

"It is all over!... There is nothing of it."

"I wish I had known it sooner: it bothered me...."

At another time more fantasies:—

"... Not on the cheek! You're no father of mine if it's on the cheek...."

At another time:—

"... Suppose I never grow up and Elizabeth does. How is that? I wouldn't like that. How do you straighten that out?"

"I can't straighten that out."

"Then I can't straighten it out, either."

---

"So young—so young!" muttered the doctor. "I was pretty old!"

One warm night the doctor walked out of doors. The south wind blew softly in his face, lifting his hair.

All round the house in yard and garden and farther away in the woods and fields everything was growing. It was a night when the earth seemed given up to the festival of youth: it was the hour of youth: of its triumph in Nature.

Little aware of where his feet carried him, he was now in the garden and now in the yard. And in the garden, low down, how sturdy little things were growing: the little radishes, the young beets, the beans—those children of the earth, flawless in their descent and environment—with what unarrestable force they were growing! Afterwards in the yard he passed some beds of lilies of the valley—most delicate breath of all flowers: how fragile but how strong, how safe in their unsullied parentage, in their ample wedlock!

All about the house the steady rush of the young! And within it—as a mausoleum—the youth of all youth for him—stopped!

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Most obedient and well-trained and irresponsible Death! Thou hast no grudge against us nor bearest toward any of us malice nor ill-will! Thou stayest away as long as thou canst and never comest till thou must! Thou visitant without will of thine own! Quickening Death, that also givest to the will of another not the shock of death, but the shock of new life!

There loomed in the darkness before the doctor as he wandered about a true picture: an ancient people in an ancient land weighed upon by their transgressions which they could neither transfer to one another nor lay upon mother earth. So once a year one of them in behalf of himself and the rest chose an exemplar of their faithful flocks and herds, and folding his hands upon its head laid upon it the burden of guilt and shame, and then had it led out of the camp—to wild waste places where no one dwelt—"to a land not inhabited."

... And now he had sent away his son into the eternal with his own life faults and failings on him....

He turned back into the house—passed through the sick room—passed through his library, passed the portrait of his wife in her bridal veil—passed down the hall—knocked at her door and opened it wide and stood in the opening:—

"... My wife, I have come to you...! Will you come to him...?"

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