The Doctor's Christmas Eve

They were everywhere! As he drove widely about the country, the two most abundant characteristics seemed to be unequalled grass and marriageable girls. He met them on turnpikes and lanes – in leafy woods at picnics – at moonlight dances – on velvet lawns – amid the roses of old gardens – and he began humorously to count those who looked available. One passed him on the road one day, and, lifting a corner of the buggy curtain, she peeped back at him: "She will do!" he said. Another swept past him on horseback and looked in the opposite direction. "She will do!" he said. He met two on a shady street of a quiet town under their peach-blow parasols: "They will do!" he said. He saw four on a lawn playing tennis, and watched their vital abandon and tasted their cup: "They will do!" he said. He swept his eyes over a ball-room one night: "They will all do!" he said, and made an end of counting.

Into this world of romance and bride-seeking the doctor launched himself formally under brilliant auspices of earth and sky and people one beautiful afternoon of early summer: it was on the grounds of one of the finest old country places at a lawn party with tennis matches. It was his first appearance as a candidate for life's greater game. A large gallery of onlookers, seated along a trellis of vines and roses, measured him critically as he stepped out on the court: he knew it and he challenged the criticism. In his white flannels; his big bared head covered with curling black hair; his neck half bare in its virile strength; his big grayish blue eyes flashing with glorious health, full of good humor and of deeper warmth; his big half-bared arms strong to hold in love or to lift in pain; the big stub nose of tenacity; the big red mouth that laughing revealed the big thick white teeth, good to tear and grind their way: his twenty-six years of native Kentucky insolence capped with a consciousness of travel and knowledge of his own authority and power – youthful white soldier of the clean, – the neighborhood's evangelist of life and death, – he looked like a good partner for the afternoon or for life. One girl, seeing all this – and more – repeated to herself, she did not know why, Blake's poem on the Tiger.

His partner that afternoon was his hostess – a Kentucky girl just home from her Northern college as a graduate. She too had been away for several years; and they had this in common as the first bond – that they had arrived as comparative strangers and saw their home surroundings from the outside: they spoke of it: it introduced them.

There was tension in the play for this reason; and for others: this first public appearance with so much going on in imagination and sympathy. Too great tension developed as the battle of the racquets went on: so that the doctor's partner, overreaching and twisting, sprained an ankle, and the games ended for them: she was assisted upstairs, and he applied his skill and his treatment.

As he drove home he thought a good deal of his partner: of her proud reserve toward him out of the game and of her inseparable blending of herself with him in the game; her devotion to their common cause; her will not that she should win but that both should win; her unruffled ignoring of a bad play of his or a bad play of her own; the freshened energy of her attack after a reverse; her matter-of-course pleasure when he played well or when she played well; the complete surrender of herself to him for the game – after which instantly there was nothing between them except the courtesy of a hostess. He thought of these traits. And then he recalled her fortitude during the acute suffering with that twisted ankle! How contemptuously she had borne pain!

"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 the nuptial 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 at a 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: wishing her 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 I should 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 were worthy 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 dark clouds 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-clipped beard; 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 played together, 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 know that, when you know her!"

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."

"Thank you!"

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 to him 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 – seen once – 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 whole presence, 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 which went 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 which she now 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 his reputation 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 of his 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 – the hands 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 that Progress of the Rake which sometimes in everyday reality coincides with the Progress of the Harlot and with the Progress of Marriage à la Mode and with the Progress 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: and when 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 child might 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: —