James Allen - The Doctor's Christmas Eve

"Anyhow, I have learned that cows have the new American way of chewing; so they never get indigestion, do they?"

"If they do, they cannot voice their symptoms in my mummied ears," said the doctor, who often seemed to himself to have been listening to hue and cry for medicine since the days of Thotmes. "However, we won't say anything further about that ! What else are you going to do over there? This can't possibly be all!"

"To-night we children are going to sit up until midnight, to see whether the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise on Christmas Eve. We know they don't, but we're going to prove they don't!"

"Where did you pick up that notion?"

"Where did you pick it up when you were a boy?"

"I fail to remember," admitted the doctor with mock dignity, damaged in his logic but recalling the child legend that on the Night of the Nativity universal nature was in sympathy with the miracle. All sentient creatures were wakeful and stirring, and sent forth the chorus of their cries in stables and barns – paying their tribute to the Divine in the Manger and proclaiming their brotherhood with Him who was to bring into the world a new gospel for them also.

"I don't know where I got that," he repeated. "Well, after the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise, then what?"

"There isn't but one thing more; but that is best of all!"

"You don't say! Out with it!"

"That is our secret."

The new decision of tone demonstrated that another stage had been reached in their intercourse. The boy had withdrawn his confidence; he had entered the ranks of his own generation and had taken his confidence with him. Personally, also, he had shut the gate of his mind and the gate was guarded by a will; henceforth it was to be opened by permission of the guard. Something in their lives was abruptly ended; the father felt like ending the talk.

"Very well, then; we won't say anything more about the secret. And now you had better run along."

"But I don't want to run along just yet. It will be a long time before I see you again; have you thought of that?"

He reversed his position so as to face the fire; and he crossed his feet out beyond the promontory of the doctor's knees and folded his arms on the rampart of those enfolding arms.

For a few moments there was intimate silence. Then he inquired: —

"How old must a boy be to ask a girl?"

A flame more tender and humorous burned in the doctor's eyes.

"Ask her what ?"

"Ask her nothing! Ask her !"

"You mean tell her, don't you? Not ask her, my friend and relative; tell her!"

"Well, ask her and tell her, too; they go together!"

"Is it possible! I'm always glad to learn!"

"Then, how old must he be?"

"Well, if you stand in need of the opinion of an experienced physician, as soon as he learns to speak would be about the right period! That would be the safest age! The patient would then have leisure to consider his case before being affected by the disease. You could have time to get singed and step away gradually instead of being roasted alive all at once. Does that sound hard?"

"Not very! Do you love a girl longer if you tell her or if you don't tell her?"

"I'm afraid nobody has ever tried both ways! Suppose you try both, and let us have the benefit of your experience."

"Well, then, if you love, do you love forever?"

The doctor laughed nervously and tightened his arms around the innocent.

"Nobody has lived forever yet – nobody knows!"

"But forever while you live – do you love as long as that?"

"You wouldn't know until you were dead and then it would be too late to report. But aren't you doing a good deal of hard fighting this morning, – on soft-boiled eggs, – though I think the victory is yours, General, the victory is truly and honestly yours!"

"I can't stop thinking, can I? You don't expect me to stop thinking, do you, when I'm just beginning really to think?"

"Very well, then, we won't say anything more about thinking."

"Then do you or don't you?"

"Now, what are you trying to talk about?" demanded the doctor angrily, and as if on instant guard. A new hatred seemed coming to life in him; there was a burning flash of it in his eyes.

"Just between ourselves – suppose that when I am a man and after I have been married to Elizabeth awhile, I get tired of her and want a little change. And I fell in love with another man's wife and dared not tell her, because if I did I might get a bullet through me; would I love the other man's wife more because I could not tell her, or would I love her more because I told her and risked the bullet?"

Pall-like silence draped the room, thick, awful silence. The father lifted his son from his lap to the floor, and turned him squarely around and looked him in the eyes imperiously. Many a time with some such screened but piercing power he, as a doctor, had scrutinized the faces of children to see whether they were aware that some vast tragedy of life was in the room with them. To keep them from knowing had often been his main care; seeing them know had been life's last pity; young children finding out the tragedies of their parents with one another – so many kinds of tragedies.

"You had better go now," he urged gently. Then an idea clamped his brain in its vise.

"And remember: while you are over there, you must try to behave with your best manners because you are going to stay in the house of a great lady. All the questions that you want to ask, ask me when you come back. Ask me !"

The boy standing before his father said with a strange quietness and stubbornness, probing him deeply through the eyes: —

"You haven't answered my last question yet, have you?"

"Not yet," said the doctor, with strange quietness also.

The boy had never before heard that tone from his father.

"It's sad being a doctor, isn't it?" he suggested, studying his father's expression.

"What do you know about sad? Who told you anything about sad?" muttered the doctor with new sadness now added to old sadness.

"Nobody had to tell me! I knew without being told."

"Run along now."

"Now I'll walk along, but I won't run along. I'll walk away from you, but I won't run away from you."

He wandered across the room, and stood with his hand reluctantly turning the knob. Then with a long, silent look at his father – he closed the door between them.

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.