The Doctor's Christmas Eve

"Nothing is said about crumbs; they were fragments."

"But if I've got to believe it, I've got to think how they did it! I've got to! If I can't think of it as it is, I must think of it as it isn't! But I can't do anything with the loaves; I give up the bread. However, I think those two fish might have been leviathans. That would be only two thousand five hundred people to each leviathan. Many of them might not have liked leviathan. I wouldn't have wanted any! They could have skipped me! They could have had my slice! And the babies – they didn't want much! Anyhow, that's the best I can do for the fish"; and he had his laugh also – not an incessant ripple like hers, but a music issuing from the depths of him through joy in the things he saw.

Elsie made the reply which of late was becoming habitual in her talks with him.

"Don't begin to be peculiar, Herbert. You are too young to be peculiar. Leave that to old people!" and Elsie's mind glided off from the loaves and the fishes of Galilee to certain old people of her neighborhood from whose eccentricities she extracted acrid amusement.

The boy's words were not irreverent; irreverence had never been taught him; he did not know what irreverence was. They merely expressed the primary action of his mind in dealing with what to him was a wonder-story of Nature. And yet with this same mind which asked of wonder that it be reasonable, he was on his way to the celebration of Christmas Eve and to the story of the Nativity – the most joyous, the most sad, the most sublime Nature-story of mankind.

His unconscious requirement was that this also must be reasonable; if it were not, he would accept the portions that were reasonable and reject the others as now too childish for his fore-handed American brain.

They were nearing the end of their bitter walk. The little girl as she hurried forward now and then strained her eyes toward the opposite ends of the house ahead; at the kitchen smoke which promised such gifts to the flesh; at the window-shutters of the darkened parlor where the Christmas Tree stood, soon to be decorated with presents: some for her – the little fat mercenary now approaching who was positive that during these days of preparation she had struck a shrewd bargain with the Immortal.

The boy, too, looked at these windows; but especially he looked at another between them, from which perhaps Elizabeth was watching for him.

Once he turned, and, walking backward, directed his gaze from this high point far across the country. Somewhere back there his father might now be stopping at a farm-house. A malignant disease was raging among the children of the neighborhood, some of whom were his schoolmates and friends; the holidays would bring no merry Christmas for them.

Wherever his father might be, there an influence started and came rushing across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud. It fell upon him, and travelled on toward the house he was approaching; it disappeared within the house and fell upon the woman who so wonderfully moved about in it: a chilling mysterious shadow that bound the three of them – his father and himself and this gentle woman – together in a band of darkness.

Then he faced about and ran on, longing the more ardently for Elizabeth: the path between him and Elizabeth lay before his nimble feet like a band of light.

II

WHEN A BOY FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS FATHER

On the day preceding that twenty-fourth of December when his two weather-proof untrammelled children were rioting over the frozen earth, Dr. Birney met with an event which may here be set down as casting the first direct light upon him. Some reflected radiance may already have gone glancing in his direction from the luminous prattle of his offspring; some obscure glimpses must therein have bodied him forth: and the portraits that children unconsciously paint of people – what trained hand ever drew such living lines?

A short stretch across the country from his comfortable manor house there towered in stateliness one of the finest homesteads of this region; and in the great bedroom of this house, in the mother's bed, there had lain for days one of his patients critically ill, the only child of an intense mother who was herself no longer young.

Early that morning upon setting out he had driven rapidly to this house, gotten quickly out, and been quickly received through the front door thrown open to admit him. After examining the child, he had turned to the mother and spoken the words that are probably the happiest ever to fall from any tongue upon any ear: —

"He is out of danger. He is getting well."

At this intelligence the mother forgot the presence of another mother older than herself who had come to be with her during these vigils and anxieties. As the doctor, having spoken a few words to the nurse, passed out into the hall toward the hat-rack, she led him into the parlors; she pulled him down into a chair beside the one she took; she caught his hand in hers and drew it into her lap. She forgot that after all she was a woman and he was a man; she remembered only that she was a mother and he a physician; and unnerved by the relief from days and nights of tension, she poured out her quivering gratitude.

The doctor with a warm light in his eyes listened; and he was flushed with pleasure also at his skill in bringing his case through; but she had scarcely begun before his expression showed embarrassment. Gratitude rendered him ill at ease: who can thank Science? Who can thank a man for doing his duty and his best? With a smile of deprecation he interrupted: —

"A great surgeon of France centuries ago was accustomed to say of a convalescent patient: 'God cured him; I dressed him.' I do not know whether, if I dared speak for the science of medicine near the close of the nineteenth century, I could say that. That is not the language of science now. If science thanks anything, it thanks other sciences and respects itself. But I will say that I might not have been able to save the life of your son if he had not been a healthy child – and a happy one; for happiness in a child is of course one of its signs of health. In his case I did not have to treat a patient with a disease; I had merely to treat a disease in a patient: and there is a great difference. The patient kept out of the case altogether, or in so far as he entered it, he entered it as my assistant. But if he had not been healthy and happy, the result might have been – well, different."

The mother's face became more radiant.

"If his health and happiness helped him through," she exclaimed, "then his mother enters into the case; for his health was his birthright from his parents; and his happiness – on account of the absence of his father during most of his life when he has been awake – has been a gift from his mother. He has lived with Happiness; Happiness has been before his eyes; Happiness has filled his ears; Happiness has held him in its arms; Happiness has danced for his feet; Happiness has rocked him to sleep; Happiness has smiled over him when he awoke. He has not known anything but Happiness because Happiness has been his mother. And so, if he owes the preservation of his life to Happiness, he owes it to the instinct of maternal imitation."

The doctor had heard this carolling of maternity with full approval – this heaven-rising skylark song of motherhood; but at the last sentence he pricked up his ears with disfavor and stopped smiling: with him these were marks that he had withdrawn his intellectual fellowship. The trouble was that he esteemed her a charming and irreproachable woman and wife and mother; but that he could accord her no rank as a scientist, no standing whatsoever; and therefore he must part company with her when she spoke for instincts. The instinct of maternal imitation – the vanity of it! That her sex could believe a child to be sent into this world by the great Mother of all wisdom and given so poor a start as to be placed under the tyranny of an instinct to imitate any other imperfect human being – man or woman.

Perhaps it was one of his weaknesses, when he came upon a case of folly, to wish to perform an operation in mental surgery at once – and without anæsthetics, in order that the wide-awake intelligence of the sufferer might be enlisted against the recurrence of such a necessity.

In a tone of affectionate forbearance he now said: —

"If only there were any such thing in Nature as the instinct of maternal imitation! Children have enough instincts to battle with and fight their way through, as it is. Let me beg of you not to teach your child anything as criminally wrong as that; and don't you be so criminally wrong as to believe it!"

The mother's countenance fell. She released the doctor's hand and pushed her chair back; and she brushed out her lap with both hands as though his words might somehow have fallen into it, and she did not wish them to remain there. She spoke caustically: —

"No intimate sacred bond between mother and child which guides it to imitate her?"

She felt as though he had attacked the very citadel of motherhood; as though he had overthrown the tested and adopted standards of universal thinking, the very basic idea of existence; and she recoiled from this as a taint of eccentricity in him – that early death-knell of a physician's usefulness.

But the doctor swept her words away with gay warmth: —

"Oh, there is the intimate sacred bond, of course! No doubt the most intimate, the most sacred in this world. Believe in that all you can: the more the better! But we are not speaking of that: that has nothing to do with this imagined instinct of maternal imitation. Don't you know that a foundling in a foundling asylum as instinctively imitates its nurse? Don't you know that a child as instinctively imitates its stepmother – if it loves her? Don't you know that a child as instinctively imitates its grandmother?"

The mother lay back in her chair and looked at him without a word. But then, Doctor Birney could be rude, curt, brutal. In proof of which he now leaned over toward her and continued with more gentleness: —

"Do you not know that every child in this world begins its advance into life by one path only – the path of least resistance? and its path of least resistance is paved and lined with what it likes! As soon as it can do anything for itself, it tries to do what it likes, and it never tries to do anything else. When, later on, a time comes when it can be persuaded to do a thing that it has already desired not to do, then its will comes into the case; it ceases to be simply a little animal and becomes a little human animal; it begins to be moral and heroic instead of unmoral and unheroic. But we are not talking about that. The best we can do is to call those earliest movements of its life the reaching out of its instincts and its taking hold of things that are like its own leading traits. The parallel is in Nature where the tendril of a vine takes hold of the matured branch of the same vine and pulls itself up by this. Thus one generation knits itself to another through the binding of like to like; and that is the whole bond between mother and child or father and child: it is like attaching itself to like under the influence of love. In this world every subject has two doors: you open one, and the good things come out. You open the other, and the evil things come out. This subject has its two doors: and I open first the door of Mother of Pearl – for you two pearls of mothers! Out of it come all the exquisite radiant traits that bind mothers and children. How many great men in history have begun their growth by attaching themselves to the great traits of their mothers? Then there is the other door. I am sorry to open it, but whether I open it or not, opened it will be: the Door of Ebony behind which are imprisoned all the dark things that bind parents and children. I am afraid I shall have to illustrate: if a child is born mendacious and its mother has mendacity as one of her leading traits, its little mendacity will flourish on her large mendacity. If it is born deceitful, and hypocrisy is one of her traits, hypocrisy in it will pull itself up by taking hold of hypocrisy in her. If it is born quick-tempered, and if ungovernable temper is one of her failings, every exhibition of this in her will foster its impatience and lack of self-control. These are some few of the dreadful things that come out: and if it is dreadful even to speak of them, think how much more dreadful to see them alive and to set them at work! Now let's shut the dark Door! And let us hope that some day Nature herself may not be able to open it ever again!"

Hitherto the older of the two mothers, the mother of many children, had remained silent with that peculiar expression of patience and sweetness which lies like a halo on the faces of good women who have brought many children into the world. She now spoke as if to release many thoughts weighing heavily upon her.

"It has always been my trouble – not that my children would not imitate me, but that they would imitate me! I have my faults, for I am human; and I can endure them as long as they remain mine. They have ceased to give me much concern. I suppose in a way I have grown attached to them, just as I like people whom I do not entirely approve. But as soon as I see the children reproducing my faults, these become responsibilities. They keep me awake at night; sometimes they distress me almost beyond endurance. I know I have spent many anxious years with this problem. And I know also that the only times when their father has been overanxious about his failings has been when the boys have imitated him. He is always ready to lead a splendid attack on his faults, and they march at him from the direction of the boys!"

"And so," said the doctor, laughing, "this instinct of parental imitation is an instrument safe to take by the handle, and dangerous to grasp by the blade!"

He knew fathers in the neighborhood who were dreading the time when their sons might begin to imitate them – too far. And other fathers dreading the hour when their sons might cease to imitate their sires, and wander away preferably to imitate persons outside the family connection, – possibly an instinct of non-parental imitation!

He rose to go in a mood of great good nature, and looked from one to the other of the two mothers: —

"Perhaps Nature protected children from the danger of imitating by not making it their duty to imitate. And perhaps, as all parents are imperfect human beings, she may have thought it simple justice to children to confer upon them the right to be disobedient. At least, if there is an instinct to obey, it is backed up with an equal instinct not to obey; and the two seem to have been left to fight it out between themselves; and that perhaps is the great battle-field where incessant fighting goes on between parents and children. And at least disobedience has been of equal value with obedience in the making of human history, in the development of the race. For if children had simply obeyed their parents, if the young had been born merely to ape the old, there never would have been any human young and old. We should all still be apes, even if we had developed as far as that. You two ladies – of course with greatly modified features – might be throwing cocoanuts at each other on the tops of two rival palm-trees. Or – as the dutiful daughters of dutiful mothers – you might be taking afternoon naps in an oasis of dates – all because of that instinct of maternal imitation!"

He hurried out to the hat-rack, making his retreat at the top of his own high spirits, they following; and with one glove on he held out his hand to the mother of the sick boy: —

"I'll come in the morning to see how he is – and to see how his mother is. Now shake hands and say I have been a good doctor to you both."

The mother's reply showed that bitterness rankled in her, as she yielded her hand coldly: —

"Even if you have tried to destroy for me the intimate sacred bond between a mother and her child, I don't think you will be able to deny that my boy is a healthy and happy child because he is a child of a perfect marriage!" And she looked with secret and shaded import at the other mother.

As the doctor drove out of the yard her last words lingered —the healthy children of a perfect marriage. And the look the two mothers had exchanged! It was as though each had a sword in her eye and touched him with the point of it – hinting that he merited being run through. How often during these years he had encountered that same look from other mothers of the neighborhood!

"But if a wound like that could have been fatal," he reflected, "if a wound like that could have finished me, I should not have been here to save the life of her boy; he would have been dead this morning."

Then his mind under the rigor of long training passed to happier subjects. His success in the case of this child was one more triumph in his long list; it renewed his grip on power within him.

But for the necessity to provide for a people the services of general practitioner, Dr. Birney would have made a specialty of children's diseases. The happiest moment he experienced in his profession was a day such as this when he could announce the triumph of his skill and the saving of a young life. There was no sadder one than any day on which he walked out of the sick chamber and at the threshold met the gaunt ancient Presence, waiting to stalk in and take the final charge of the case given up by the vanquished physician. And when a few days later he sat in his buggy on the turnpike at the end of a procession – his healthy little patient stretched prostrate at the other end – he driving there as the public representative of a science that was ages old and that had gathered from all lands the wisdom of the best minds but was still impotent – on such a day he went down to his lowest defeat.

He had such faith in the future of his science that he looked forward to the time when there would be no such monstrous tragedy on this planet as infant mortality. No healthy child would ever be allowed to die of disease; disease would never be permitted to reach it, or reaching it, would be arrested as it arrived. The vast multitude of physicians and surgeons now camped around the morning of life, waiting to receive the incoming generations on the rosy mountain-tops of its dawn – nearly all these would be withdrawn; they would move across the landscape of the world and pitch their tents on the plains of waning daylight; there to receive the ragged and broken army that came staggering from the battle-field, every soldier more or less wounded, every soldier more or less weary; there to give them a twilight of least suffering, their sundown of peace; and there to arrange that the great dark Gates closed on them softly.

The conversation that morning disclosed among other facts the secret dread of Dr. Birney's life: that the time would come when his children, especially his boy, might begin to imitate him more than he desired. For a long time now he had kept under closest observation the working out in each of them of the law of like attaching itself to like; for already this had borne fruit for both on the vine of his own profession.

A physician in a city may practise his profession with complete segregation from the members of his family; his office may be miles away; if he sees his patients in his house, his children are kept in another part of it. But out in the country the whole house is open; the children rove everywhere; if their father is a physician, they know when he starts and when he returns; and there is displayed in full view the entire drama of his life. And this life is twofold: for the physician must demonstrate as no member of any other profession is required to do – that whoever would best serve mankind must first best serve himself. In this service he must reach a solution of the selfish and the unselfish; he must reconcile the world's two warring philosophies of egoism and altruism. The outside world has its attention fixed solely upon the drama of the physician's public service to it; for the members of his own family is reserved acquaintance with the drama of his devotion to himself. Well for him and well for them if they do not misunderstand!