The Doctor's Christmas Eve

III

THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Dr. Birney stood motionless in the middle of the room with his gaze riveted on the door through which his son had lingeringly disappeared.

Some one of the world's greatest painters, chancing to enter, might worthily have desired to paint him – putting no questions as to who the man was or what he was; or what darkening or brightening history stretched behind him; or what entanglement of right and wrong lay around and within: painting only the unmistakable human signs he witnessed, and leaving his portrait for thousands of people to look at afterwards and make out of it what they could – through kinship with the good and evil in themselves: Velasquez, with his brush moving upon those areas of lonely struggle which sometimes lie with their wrecks at the bottom of the sea of human eyes; Franz Hals, fixing the cares which hover too long around our mouths; Vandyck, sitting in the shadow of the mystery that slants across all mortal shoulders; Rembrandt, drawn apart into the dignity that invests colossal disappointment. Any merciless, masterful limner of them all in a mood to portray those secret passions which drive men, especially men of middle age, towards safer deeps upon the rocks.

He had a well-set soldierly figure and the swarthy roughened face that results from years of exposure to weather – a face looking as if inwardly scarred by the tempests of his character but unwrinkled by the outer years. Both face and figure breathed the silent impassiveness of the regular who has been through campaigns enough already but is enlisted for life and for whatsoever duty may bring; he standing there in some wise palpably draped in the ideals of his profession as the soldier keeps his standard waving high somewhere near his tent, to remind him of the greatness that he guards and of the greatness that guards him.

Not a tall man as men grow on that Kentucky plateau; and looking less than his stature by reason of being so strongly built, square-standing, ponderous; his muscles here and there perceivable under his loosely fitting sack-suit of dark-gray tweeds; so that out of respect for strength which is both manhood and manliness, your eye travelled approvingly over his proportions: measuring the heavy legs down to the boots; the heavy arms out to the wrists; the heavy square thick muscular warm hands; and the heavy torso up to the short neck rising full out of a low turned-down collar.

In this neck an animal wildness and virile ferocity – not subdued, not stamped out, partly tamed by a will. Overtopping this neck a tremendous head covered with short glossy black hair, curling blue-black hair. In this head a powerful blunt nose, set like the muzzle of a big gun pointed to fire a heavy projectile at a distant target – the nose of a never-releasing tenacity. Above this nose, right and left, thick black brows, the bars of nature's iron purpose. Under these brows wonderful grayish eyes with glints of Scotch blue in them or of Irish blue or of Saxon blue; for the blood of three races ran thick in his veins and mingled in the confusions of his character: blue that was in the eyes of earlier Scottish men, exulting in heather and highland stag; or the blue of other eyes that had looked meltingly on golden-haired minstrel and gold-framed harp – eyes that might have poured their love into Isolde's or have faded out in the death of Tristan; or the blue of still other eyes – archers who had shot their last arrows and, dying, drew themselves to the feet of Harold, their blue-eyed king fighting for Saxon England's right and might.

They were eyes that could look you to the core with intelligence and then rest upon you from the outside with sympathy for all that he had seen to be human in you whether of strength or of weakness – but never of meanness. Under the blunt nose a thick stubby mustache trimmed short, leaving exposed the whole red mouth – the mouth of great passions – no paltry passions – none despicable or contemptible.

On the whole a man who advances upon you with all there is in him and without waiting for you to advance upon him; no stepping aside for people in this world by this man, nor stepping timidly over things. Even as he stood there a motionless figure, he diffused an influence most warm and human, gay and tragic, irresistible. A man loved secretly or openly by many women. A man that men were glad to come to confide in, when they crossed the frontiers of what Balzac, speaking of the soldiers of Napoleon, called their miserable joys and joyous miseries.

But assuredly not a man to be put together by piecemeal description such as this: the very secret of his immense influence being some charm of mystery, as there is mystery in all the people that win us and rule us and hold us; as though we pressed our ear against this mystery and caught there the sound of a meaning vaster than ourselves – not meant for us but flowing away from us along the unbroken channels of the universe: still to be flowing there long after we ourselves are stilled.

Thus he stood in his library that morning when his son left him, brought to a stop in the road of life as by a straw fallen at his feet borne on a rising wind – another harbinger of a coming storm.

By and by not far away a door on that side of the house was slammed. The sound of muffled feet was heard on the porch and then the laughter of children as they bounded across the yard. As his ear caught the noises, he hurried to the window and looked out; and then he threw up the sash and hailed them loudly: —

"Ho, there! you winter snow-birds without wings!"

As the children wheeled and paused, he smiled and shook his forefinger: —

"Remember to keep those two red mouths closed and to breathe through those two red noses!" and then as he recalled some exercises which he had lately been putting them through, he added with ironic emphasis, laughing the while: —

"And when you breathe, remember to bring into play those two invaluable little American diaphragms and those two priceless pairs of American ribs!"

The little girl nodded repeatedly to indicate that she could understand if she would and would obey if she cared; and putting her red-mittened finger-tips to her lips, she threw him a good-by with a wide sweeping gesture of the arms to right and left. And the boy made a soldierly salute, touching a hand to his skull-cap with the uncouth rigor of a veteran in the raw: then they bounded off again.

The doctor drew down the sash and watched them.

A hundred yards from the house the ground sloped to a limestone spring at the foot of the hill – a characteristic Kentucky formation. From this spring issued a brook, on the banks of which stood a clump of forest trees, bathing their roots in the moisture. Upon reaching the brow of this hill, the boy lagged behind his sister as though to elude her observation; then turning looked back at his father – looked but made no sign: a little upright pillar of life on the brow of that declivity: then he dropped out of sight.

A few moments later up over the hill where he was last seen a little cloud of autumn leaves came scurrying. As they neared the wall of the house where the wind by pressure veered skyward to clear the roof, some of the leaves were caught up and dashed against the windowpanes behind which the doctor was standing. Had the sash been raised, they would have thrown themselves into his arms and have clung to his neck and breast.

He did not know why, but they caused him a pang: those little brown parchments torn from the finished volume of the year: they caused him a subtle pang.

He turned from the window, goaded by more than resolution, and crossed to his writing-desk on the opposite side: there lay the work mapped out for the morning. No interruptions were to be expected from his patients, though of course there might be new patients since accidents and illnesses befall unheralded. There would be no visitors – not to-day. In a country of the warmest social customs and of family ties so widely interknit that whole communities are bound together as with vine-like closeness, no one visits on the day before Christmas. In every little town the world of people crowd the streets and shops or busy themselves in preparations at home: out in the country those who have not flocked to the towns are as joyously occupied. No visitors, then. And the children were gone – no disturbances from their romping. The servants had put his rooms in order, and were too discreetly trained to return upon their paths.

After breakfast, at the stable, he had given orders to his man for the day while he was having a look at his horses – well-stalled, well-groomed, docile, intelligent: at his gaited saddle-horse, at the nag for his buggy, at the perfectly matched pair for his carriage. As he appeared in the doorway of the stalls, each beast, turning his head, had sent to him its affectionate greeting out of eyes that looked like wells of soft blue smoke: each said, "Take me to-day."

He was a little vain of being weatherwise, as is apt to be the case with country-bred folk: and at the last stable door, having studied the wind and the sky and the temperature, he had said to his man that the weather was changing: it would be snowing by afternoon. Usually in that latitude the first flurry of snow gladdens the eye near Thanksgiving, but sleighs are not often flying until late in December. There had been no snow as yet; it was due, and the weather showed signs of its multitudinous onset.

He felt so sure in his forecast that he had instructed his man to put the sleigh in readiness. He himself went into the saddle-house and from a peg amid the gear and harness he took down the sleighbells. As he shook them roughly, he smiled as above that cascade of mellow winter sounds there settled a little cloud of summer dust. He observed that the leather needed mending – what he called "a few surgical stitches"; and he had brought the bells with him to the house and they now lay on the floor of his office in the adjoining room.

He thought that if it should snow heavily enough he would use the sleigh when he started out in the afternoon. There were several sick children to visit on opposite horizons of his neighborhood. The sound of the bells as he drove in at their front gates might have value: it would not only mean the coming of his sleigh, but it would suggest to them the approach of that mysterious Sleigh of the World which that night they were expecting. Afterwards he was to go to a distant county seat for a consultation. His road home was a straight turnpike: it would be late when he returned, perhaps far in the night; and he would have the sound of the bells to himself – the bells and his thoughts and Christmas Eve.

This plan of Dr. Birney's regarding the children laid bare one of his ideas as a physician. For years he had employed increasingly in his practice the power of suggestion. For years life as he sometimes surmised had employed the power of suggestion on him. He felt assured that in treating the sick there are cases where every suggestion of happiness that can reach a patient draws him back toward life: every suggestion of unhappiness lowers his vitality and helps to roll him over the precipice: the final push need be a very slight one. The melody of sleighbells falling on the ears of the sick children that afternoon might have the weight of a sunbeam on delicate scales and tip the balances as he wished: he believed that many a time the weight of a mental sunbeam was all that was needed to decide the issue.

He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock, and dinner was served at one, and he had a tranquil outlook for three hours of work. The only remaining source from which an interruption could have reached him was his wife. His wife! – his wife never – intruded.

Not three hours, but two hours and a half, to be exact; for the dining-room adjoined his library, and every day at half past twelve o'clock his wife entered the dining-room to superintend final preparations for dinner: from the instant of her entrance concentration of mind ended for him: he occupied himself with things less important and with odds and ends for mind and body.

She would draw the shades of the windows delicately to temper the light according as the day was cloudy or cloudless; she would bring fresh flowers for the table; she would inspect the clearness of the cut glass, the brightness of the silver, the snowiness of the napkins; she would prepare at the sideboard a salad, a sauce; she would give a final push to the chairs – last of all a straightening push to his. All the lower drudgery of the servants and all the higher domestic triumphs of her skill led to his chair – as to a kind of throne where the function of feeding reigned. With that final adjustment of the piece of furniture in which his body was to be at ease while it gorged itself, with that act of grade, the doors were opened; dinner was announced; he walked in, and faced his wife, and dined – with Nemesis.

This pride of hers in housekeeping was part of her inheritance, of the civilization of her land and people: it was a little separate dynasty of itself. Often as the years had gone by he had been thankful that she could thus far find compensation for larger disappointment; it helped to keep her a healthy woman if it could not render her a happy wife. Near the sugar and the flour she could perhaps three times a day realize small perfections; she could mould little ideals and turn them out on the shelf and verify them with a silver spoon: an ideal life in the pantry for a woman who had expected an ideal life with him in library and parlor and bedroom and out in the world. It was all as if she sat at the base of Love's ruined Pyramids and tried to divert her desolation by configuring ant hills.

And he was well aware that this pride of housekeeping was the least of all the prides that grouped themselves around that central humiliation of wifehood. He had sometimes thought that if, after her death, over her were planted a weeping willow, mere nutritive pride in her dust would force the boughs to reverse their natural direction and shoot upward as stiff as a spruce.

The dining-room, in the old-fashioned Kentucky way, was richly carpeted; but the moment she set her foot within it, he could trace her steps as unerringly as though she had been shod with explosives. Likewise she sang to herself a good deal: (he had long ago diagnosed that symptom of nervous self-consciousness).

When he had married her, voice and piano had been one of the resources he thought he would hold in reserve for the emptying years; music would fill so much rational silence. It was one of his semi-serious declarations that only two people more or less out of their senses could keep on talking to each other till death forced them to hold their tongues. But with tragic swiftness and sureness a few years after their marriage the music stopped, the piano was shut.

More than that terminated. After two children were born, there were no more: that profound living music came to an end also. And perhaps one of the deepest desires of his nature was for that kind of long union with his wife and for many children: perhaps the only austerity in him was an austere patriarchal authority to people the earth and to bequeath the inheritance of it to his seed.

When she had ceased singing to him soon after marriage, she had begun to sing to herself – habitually during this half-hour of proximity. The sound took up a fixed abode in his ear as there is a roaring in a seashell. He could hear it miles across the country; it was the loudest sound to him in this world – that barely audible self-conscious singing of his wife.

During this interval also she addressed her commands to the maid in tones lowered not to disturb him. He could not hear the words, but there was no mistaking the tones! What beautiful, eager, victorious, thrilling tones – over a dish of steaming vegetables – over a savory toast! They forced him to be reminded that the nature of his wife was not a brook run dry; its leaping waters were merely turned away into another channel. Only when she spoke with him did the cadence of her tones sag; then all the modulations ran downhill as into some inner pit of emptiness.

It was impossible for him to believe that the occasional chuckle and cackle of the maid during these whispered colloquies grew out of aspersions winged at him – at the hungry ogre, middle-aged, almost corpulent, on the other side of the wall; at the species of advanced gorilla, poorly disguised in collar and necktie and midway garments; and with wool and leather drawn over his lower pair of modernized walking hands! Yet the truth was undeniable that when dinner was announced and he went in, the maid, standing behind her mistress's chair, fixed her gaze on him with fresh daily delight in understanding or misunderstanding the wretchedness of the household.

The first time he had ever seen this maid was one evening upon going in to supper. They were expecting guests, and his wife wore an evening gown. As he seated himself, he became aware almost without glancing across the table that something novel had arrived upon the scene – something youthful yet as immemorial as Erebus. Behind the glistening whiteness of his wife's bust with its cold proud dignity, there was something sable – birdlike – all beak and eyes – with a small head on which grew a kind of ruffled indignant feathers. He tried to take no further notice of the apparition, but could not escape the experience that several times during the meal he rescued his biscuit as from between the claws of a competing raven.

In the course of time, as this combination of black and white refused to dissolve and rather coalesced into a duality holding good for meal hours, he felt impelled to characterize the alliance – to envisage for his own relief the totality of its comic gloom. So he called it his Bust of Pallas and his Nevermore. And his Nevermore, perched behind his Bust of Pallas at every function, fixed her dull stupid eyes on him in unceasing judgment. He was never quite persuaded of the human reality of her; never fully believed that she reached to the carpet: and he never got up from the table to see whether she cast a shadow on the floor; but he knew that it was the fowl's intention to cast whatsoever shadow it carried about with it upon him.

She had become a critic of his domestic relations. This servant, this mal-arrangement of beak and eyes, with bare brain enough not to let plates fall and not to dangle her fingers in scalding water nor singe her head-feathers in the oven – this servant of his arraigned him in his humanity! And if this servant, then all his servants. And if all his servants, then all the servants of the neighborhood. The whole Plutonian shore croaked its black damnation of him. Of him! – the leading citizen of his community, its central vital character who held in his keeping the destiny of a people! He had a vision of the august assemblage of them uplifted into the heavenliness of an African Walhalla – such as is disclosed in the last act of the Tetralogy– all gazing down upon him as a profaning Alberic who had raped the virgin Gold of marital love.