The Doctor's Christmas Eve

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: —

"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.