Dr. Lavendar's People

"Well, you know she has always been about twelve; it's the young head on old shoulders."

"I must tell you her last performance," Miss Harriet said. "You know that picture of Aunt Gordon that hung in the dining-room? Dreadful thing! I never saw the poor woman, but I believe she wasn't quite as ugly as that portrait, though Alex looks just like her, Dr. Lavendar says; and Alex is dreadfully ugly, with those pale eyes of his. Well, I happened to say – it was last Tuesday, at tea, and Matty Barkley was there: 'That picture of Aunt Gordon is awful! I can't bear it.' Of course I never thought of it again, until I came home the next day – and what do you suppose?"

Willy began to grin.

"Yes! she had got up on a chair, if you please, and cut it out of the frame and slashed it all to pieces."

"Well done!" said Willy King, slapping his thigh.

"No such thing. It was ugly, but it was a family portrait."

"What did she say?"

"Oh, she had her excuse… Willy, I can't understand her mind; it is so unreasonably reasonable: 'Sister, you said you couldn't bear it, so what was the use of having it?' After all, that was sense, William."

"So it was," said the doctor, and unhooked his reins and nodded. "Well," he said —

But Miss Harriet laughed awkwardly. "Wait a minute, can't you? It won't kill anybody to do without a pill for five minutes."

"Well, no, I suppose it won't," William admitted; "but with a view to getting home in time for dinner – "

"Oh, let Martha wait. Willy, you are the meekest being – let her wait. Tell her you'll have your dinner when you're good and ready."

"Martha is only concerned on my own account," the loyal William protested.

"Well, I'm not going to keep you long," his old friend said, roughly; "I – I just want to ask you a question." Her face grew suddenly a dull red. "Not that I believe in your pills and potions – just please remember that. But I suppose you do know a little something."

"I could diagnose a scratched finger," said the doctor, meekly.

"Well – " she said, and looked at the lock of her rifle; "there's nothing in the world the matter with me, but – "

"You don't look like a confirmed invalid," the doctor assured her.

"No! – do I?" she said, eagerly. "I really am very well, William – very well. Dear me, when I get home after a round of my traps (when Annie hasn't teased me by letting things out) and eat a good dinner, and sit down with a taxidermy magazine, I – I wouldn't thank King George to be my uncle. Yes, I am very well."

Her emphasis had in it a certain agitation that caught the doctor's eye. "Your out-of-door life is calculated to keep you well," he said.

Miss Harriet got up and thrust the rabbit back into the pouch at her side. "Of course; and, anyhow, I'm not the sick kind. Imagine me shut up between four walls! I should be like Sterne's starling. Do you remember? – 'I want to get out, I want to get out.' No, there's nothing the matter with me. Absolutely nothing."

She did look very well, the big, brown woman, towering up at the road-side, with her rifle in her hand and the good color in her cheeks and lips. Yet her eyes had a worn look, William thought. "Pain somewhere," said the doctor to himself.

"You know, I don't believe in your pills and truck," she insisted, frowning.

"Of course not," he assured her easily. "Come, now, Miss Harriet, what's wrong?"

"Nothing, I tell you," she said, sharply; and then, with impatient brevity, she spoke of some special discomfort which had annoyed her. "It began about six months ago."

"Probably you've taken cold," William King said, and then he asked a question or two. She answered with irritable flippancy:

"Now don't put on airs, Willy. There's no use trying to impress me; I know you. Remember, you were in my Sunday-school class."

"Why didn't you make a better boy of me, then? You had your chance. Miss Harriet, would you mind coming into my office and just letting me look you over? Come, now, why shouldn't I get a job out of you for once? Here you tackle me on the road-side and get an opinion for nothing."

She chuckled, but retorted that she hated doctors and their offices. "I'm not that Drayton cat," she said, "always wanting a doctor to fuss over me. No, you can give me a pill right here – though I haven't a bit of faith in it."

"I wouldn't waste a good pill on you," the doctor defended himself. "You've got to come and see me."

But when she had promised to come, and William, slapping a rein down on the mare's flank, was jogging along under the sycamore branches, he did not fall into his pleasant drowse again. "She looks so well," he said to himself, "she must be all right – "

Miss Harriet's house, called by Old Chester children "The Stuffed-Animal House," was on the hill-road a stone's-throw beyond the burial-ground. It was of weather-worn brick, and its white lintels, carved in thin festoons of fruit and flowers, were nearly hidden by ivy that stretched dark figures over the marble, and, thickening with the years across the tops of the windows, made the rooms within dim with wavering leaf shadows. A brick path, damp and faintly green with moss, ran down to a green gate set in a ragged privet hedge that was always dusty and choked with dead twigs. The house itself was so shaded by horse-chestnuts that grass refused to grow in the door-yard. A porch shadowed the front door, which opened into a dark, square hall, full of dim figures that hung from the ceiling and stood in cases against the walls. A dusty crocodile stretched overhead, almost the width of the hall; a shark, with varnished belly splitting a little under one fin and showing a burst of cotton, lurked in a dim corner; over the parlor door a great snake, coiled about a branch, looked down with glittering, yellow eyes; and along the walls were cases of very beautiful birds, their plumage dulled now, for it was forty years since Miss Harriet's father had made his collection. But all around the hall were glistening eyes that stared and stared, until sometimes an Old Chester child, clinging to a mother's protecting hand, felt sure they moved, and that in another moment the crocodile's jaws would snap together, or the eagle's wings would flap horribly in the darkness.

Yet there was an awful joy to Old Chester youth in being allowed to accompany a mother when she made a polite call on Miss Harriet. This hall, that was dark and still and full of the smell of dead fur and feathers and some acrid preservative, had all the fascination of horror. If we were very good we were allowed to walk from case to case with old Miss Annie, while our mothers sat in the parlor and talked to Miss Harriet. Miss Annie could not tell us much of the creatures in the cases, and for all she used to laugh and giggle just as we did, she never really knew how to play that the hall was a desert island and the wild beasts were lurking in the forest to fall upon us.

"It isn't a forest, it's our front hall," Miss Annie would say; "and you must do what I tell you, because I'm the oldest, and I don't want to play desert island. But I'll show you my chickens," she would add, with eager politeness.

Sometimes, if Miss Annie were not in the room, we would hear Miss Harriet tell some story about her mischievousness, and our mothers would sigh and smile and say, "Poor dear!" Our mothers never said "poor dear!" about us when we did such things. If one of us Old Chester children had spoken out in church as Miss Harriet said Miss Annie did once, and told Dr. Lavendar that he was telling a story when he read in the morning lesson that the serpent talked to Eve – "because," said Miss Annie, "snakes can't talk" – if we had done such a dreadful thing, we should have been taken home and whipped and sent to bed without any supper, and probably the whole of the third chapter of Genesis to learn by heart. We should not have been "poor things!" This was very confusing to Old Chester youth until we grew older and understood. Then, instead of being puzzled, we shrunk a little and stayed close to our mothers, listening to Miss Harriet's stories of Miss Annie with strange interest and repulsion, or staring furtively at the little old woman, who laughed often and had a way of running about like a girl, and of smoothing back her gray hair from her temples with a fluttering gesture, and of putting up her lip and crying when she was angry or frightened or when she saw anything being hurt. Miss Annie could never bear to see anything hurt; she would not let us kill spiders, and she made us walk in the grass instead of on the brick path, because the ants came up between the bricks, and she was afraid we would step on them.

"Annie is very kind-hearted," Miss Harriet used to tell our mothers. "She can't bear my traps."

Miss Harriet's traps were her passion; her interest in taxidermy had come to her from her father, and though she had not been able to add anything of real value to Mr. Hutchinson's collection, her work was thoroughly well done; and she even made a fair sum of money each year by sending her squirrels and doves to town for the Christmas trade.

But more important than the money was the wholesome out-of-door life her little business entailed, which had given her her vigorous body and sane mind. She needed both to live with this gray-haired woman, whose mind was eleven or twelve years old. It was not a bad mind for eleven or twelve, Willy King used to say. Old Miss Annie had a sort of crude common-sense; she could reason and determine as well as any other twelve-year-old child – indeed, with an added shrewdness of experience that sixty years of bodily age made inevitable. She knew, innocently, much of life that other children were guarded from knowing; she knew death, too, but with no horror – perhaps as we were meant to know it – something as natural as life itself, and most of all as a release from pain. For old Annie knew pain and feared it as only the body in which the soul is not awake can fear it. She wept at the sight of blood and moaned when she heard a squirrel squeak in the trap; she shivered with passionate expectation of relief when Miss Harriet's kindly chloroform brought peace to fluttering wings or beating claws. When some soft, furry creature, hurt in the trap, relaxed into happy sleep in the thick, sweet smell that came out of Miss Harriet's big bottle, Miss Annie would laugh for joy, the tears of misery still wet upon her wrinkled cheeks.

"Don't come into my shop," Miss Harriet used to say, laughing and impatient, when Miss Annie would follow her into the room in the barn where she did her work – "don't come in here, and then you won't see things that hurt your feelings."

But Annie, smoothing her hair back from her temples with a curious, girlish gesture, would only shake her head and sidle closer to her sister, the young, guileless eyes in the withered face full of protest and appeal. Her horror of pain lost Miss Harriet many a fine specimen; for, in her pity for the trapped creatures, Annie, noiselessly, like some Indian hunter, used to follow on her sister's footsteps through the woods, lifting the baits out of the traps, or if she found a snared creature unhurt, letting it go, and then creeping home, frightened at Miss Harriet's anger, which, if she discovered the old child's naughtiness, fell like a thunderbolt, and then cleared into patient amusement, as a black shower brightens into sunshine. The big, kind woman with a man's mind could not be angry at this poor creature; so she did her duty by her and tried not to think about her. She went her way, and set her traps, and prepared her few specimens, brushing Annie or any other annoyance aside with careless good-nature.

"Don't think about unpleasant things," she used to say, in her loud, cheerful voice. "The trouble with you doctors and ministers," she told Dr. Lavendar, "is that you make people think about their insides. It's stomachs with Willy and souls with you. Nobody ought to know that they have a stomach or a soul. I don't. A tree don't. And there isn't an oak in Old Chester that isn't pleasanter than Mrs. Drayton. Yet she's always fussing about her insides – spiritual and material."

"It's when you don't have 'em that you fuss," Dr. Lavendar said; "the trouble isn't too much soul, it's too little. And I guess it's the same with stomachs."

"Then you say Mrs. Drayton has no soul?" Miss Harriet said, pleasantly.

"I never said anything of the sort," said Dr. Lavendar.

As for Miss Harriet, she went on to Willy King's office, prepared, as usual, to make him as uncomfortable as she could. But she never put Willy out. Her flings at his profession tickled him immensely, and if now and then the good, honest William practised, as Miss Harriet said, a few of the tricks of his trade, he was not averse to sharing their humor with some one who could appreciate it.

"So you have that Drayton cat on your hands again?" Miss Harriet said, plumping herself down in William's own chair in front of his office table so that she could pick up and examine what she called his "riffraff." ("Do open your windows, William. I don't see how you can be so shut up. Po-o-o! how can people live so much in-doors?")

"Well," said William, doing as he was bid, "she enjoys my visits and I enjoy her checks. I don't complain."

"That's like the profession," said Miss Harriet; "you put your hands in our pockets whenever you get a chance. Well, you'll get nothing out of my pocket, William, for there's nothing in it."

"Miss Harriet," said William, chuckling – "you won't tell anybody, will you? But Mrs. – well, I won't name names; that's not professional – "

"Call her a 'Female,'" said Miss Harriet.

"Well, a Female sent for me on Tuesday, in a dreadful hurry; I must come, 'right off! quick!' I was just sitting down to breakfast, but of course I ran – "

"Martha must have been pleased?"

"I ran; and arrived, winded. There was – the Female, at her breakfast. 'Oh,' she said, 'doctor, the baby has slept right through from six last night, and he hasn't wakened up yet. I am afraid there is something the matter with his little brain.'"

"William, if you didn't say that there was something the matter with her little brain – "

"I didn't," William said, grimly, "because she hasn't any. Now, Miss Harriet, let's talk about yourself; it's pleasanter."

"Oh, there was not the slightest occasion to come to see you. But I said I would, and here I am. I suppose you'll send me a bill as long as my arm. Do you have a system of charges, Willy? So much for a look over your glasses? So much for that solemn cough? I suppose you grade all your tricks. Now work off the most expensive ones on me; I propose to get the worth of my money, young man."

"Thought you said you weren't going to pay any bills?" William reminded her; and then refused to be side-tracked any longer, but asked question after question, bringing her up once or twice with a sharp turn. "Don't joke now, please, Miss Harriet. Be as exact as you can. Is this condition thus, or so – ?" And when he got through with his questions, he took up the joking rather heavily.

"You're so faithless about pills," he said, "that I'm not going to give you any."

"What! no pills?" said Miss Harriet.

William King laughed awkwardly. "Not a pill! I don't see any condition which warrants them: but – "

"What did I tell you? There's nothing the matter, and you just dragged me here to give your office a busy look."

"I didn't suppose you'd see through it," said Willy King. "But, Miss Harriet, I – I don't feel quite satisfied. I – do you know I've a great mind to get a man in Mercer to look you over? I want you to go up with me to-morrow and see him."

"Nonsense!"

"No, truly," he said; "I am not satisfied, Miss Harriet."

"But what do you mean?" she insisted, sharply. "There's nothing the matter with me. You said yourself I didn't need any medicine. Give me some opiate to stop this – this discomfort when it comes on, and I'll be all right."

"You can't bear opiates," he said, bluntly; "your heart won't stand them. Don't you remember the time you broke your ankle and I tried morphine – a baby dose – to give you some relief? You gave me a scare, I can tell you."

Miss Harriet was silent. Then: "I've known my heart wasn't right for two years. But – "

"Oh, your heart doesn't give me any concern – if you don't take liberties with it. Perhaps it isn't quite as good as it was thirty years ago, but – "

"Ah, I lost it to you then, Willy. You were a sweet little fellow when you came into my class. Do you remember once when – "

"Miss Harriet, you've got to go to Mercer with me to-morrow," William King interrupted, quietly. "I hope there's nothing much out of the way. I hope not. I – I believe not. But I'm not sure. We'll go up and see Greylord and find out. He'll give you some pills, maybe," he ended, and laughed and got up. "Now I'm off to the cat, Miss Harriet."

And Miss Harriet, to her astonishment, found herself dismissed before she had made the boy tell her what he was afraid of. "He is a boy," she said to herself. "Of course he wouldn't be apt to know what was the matter. I ought to have gone to see some Mercer man to begin with. I remember when Willy was born."

When they came out of the Mercer doctor's door William King's fresh face had gone white, but Miss Harriet walked smiling. At the foot of the steps the doctor paused and stood an instant leaning on the hand-rail, as though for support and to get his breath. Miss Harriet looked at him with concern. "Why, Willy!" she said.

"Miss Harriet," William said, hoarsely, "he may be mistaken. It's perfectly possible that he is mistaken."

"I guess not, Willy," she said, simply. "Come, now, don't be such a wet string." She struck him a friendly blow on the shoulder that made the doctor take a quick step forward to keep his balance; but it gave him the grip upon himself that for a single instant he had lost.

"And, anyhow," he said, "even if he is right, it may not develop. I've known a case where it was checked for two years; and then the patient died of small-pox."

"Pleasant alternative," said Miss Harriet; she was smiling, her face full of color, her shoulders back, her head up. "Come, Willy, let's have a spree. Here we are for a day, and Martha's at home. We'll have a good dinner, and we'll do something interesting. Hurrah!" said Harriet Hutchinson.

And the doctor could do no less than fall into step at that martial note and march at her side proudly. And by some spiritual contagion his courage met hers like the clash of swords. They went to get their good dinner, and Miss Harriet ate it with appetite. Afterwards she declared they would go to the circus. "It's in town; I saw the tents. I haven't been to a circus for forty years," she said; "but I know just how the pink lemonade tastes. You've got to treat, Willy."

"I'll throw in pea-nuts," said William King; and with that they left the restaurant and went sauntering along the hot, grimy street in the direction of the open lots beyond the blast-furnaces, where, under a deep June sky, dazzling even though it was smudged by coils of smoke, were stretched the circus tents, brave with flags and slapping and billowing in a joyous wind. William King held on to his hat and looked at the great, white clouds, domed and shining, piled all along the west. "We'll get a shower, I'm afraid, Miss Harriet."

"Well, take a pill, Willy, and then it won't hurt you," she told him, with a laugh that belonged to the sun and wind, to the flags whipping out on their halyards and the signs of the side-shows bellying from their guy-ropes, to the blare of music and the eager circus crowd – that crowd that never changes with changing generations. Still there is the old man gaping with excited eyes; still the lanky female in spectacles; the cross elder sister afraid of crushing her fresh skirts; the little boy absorbed in thought; the little girl who would like to ride on the Shetland pony when the clown offers any miss in the audience an opportunity. We know them all, and doubtless they know us, the patronizing, amused on-lookers, who suddenly become as eager and absorbed as any graybeard or child in the crowd. We know the red boxes, too, where men with hard faces and wearied eyes shout mechanically the same words of vociferous invitation to the side-shows. Children, pulled along by their elders, would stop, open-mouthed, before these men; but somehow they never see the wild man or the fat lady. Ah, the regret for the unseen side-shows! – the lady with the snakes; the skeleton man; the duel between the educated hyena and his trainer – that hyena of whom the man in the red box speaks with such convincing enthusiasm. "I have been," cries the strident voice – "I have been connected with circuses all my life – all my life, ladies and gentlemen! – and I give you my sacred word of honor that this is the most magnificent specimen of the terrible grave-robbing hyena that I have ever seen!" Why did we never see that hyena? Why, why did we always hurry on to the main tent? It is the pang that even paradise must know, of the lost experience of earth – or perhaps of hell.

"We ought to see the fat lady," said Dr. King.

"I'm afraid we'll be late," Miss Harriet objected, eagerly.

So they pushed on with the impatient, good-natured crowd. The smell of tan-bark and matted pelts and stale pea-nut shells came in a gust as they jostled under the flap of the outer tent and found themselves inside the circle of gilded cages. "Shall we go right in and get our seats?" William said.

"What! and not look at the animals? Willy, you're crazy. I want to feed the elephants. Why, there are a lot of them, six or seven."

So they trudged around the ring, their feet sinking deep into the loose, trampled earth. Miss Harriet poked the monkeys clinging to the grating of their car, with her big umbrella, and examined the elephant's hide with professional interest. "Imagine curing that proboscis," she said. And then they stopped in front of a miserable, magnificent lion, turning, turning, turning in a cage hardly more than his own length. Miss Harriet drew in her breath. "It's being trapped that is so awful, Willy. The consciousness that you can't get out. It isn't the – the pain of it; it's being trapped."

William King, looking at the poor tawny creature of the desert and free winds and life that dealt death with passion, blinked suddenly behind his glasses. "But you trap things yourself," he protested, a moment afterwards.

"Oh, but I don't keep 'em trapped; I kill 'em," she defended herself. "I couldn't keep things shut up. I'd be as bad as Annie if I saw any living creature that wasn't free to get out-of-doors." And then she pushed on to the next cage, and the next; then suddenly feared that they would not get good seats if they wasted any more time among the animals. "For we won't have any reserved doings," she said. "I want to sit on those boards that I sat on forty years ago."

She was as excited as she might have been forty years ago; and pushed ahead into the big tent, dragging William by the hand, and climbing up tier after tier, to get a good view of the ring. When they sat down, she made haste to spread open the flimsy pink sheet of the programme with its pale type, and read to William, in a loud, ecstatic voice, just what was going to happen:

"Display No. 1. Gigantic Pageantric Prelude – presenting Equitational Exercises, Hippo-dramatical Revivals, Pachydermical Aggregations – the only terpsichorean Pachyderms ever taught to tread the mazes of the Quadrille.

"Display No. 2. Claire St. Jeal and her company – the loveliest daughters of Italy, and world-famous bareback equestriennes —"

"You are sure you are not getting tired?" William King interrupted.

"Tired?" she repeated, scornfully. "William, as Matty Barkley would say, you are a perfect fool. Why should I be tired? I feel first rate – never better. I wouldn't thank King George to be my uncle! I've wanted to come to the circus for years. Willy, what will your wife say?"

"Nothing," said William, significantly.

At which Miss Harriet laughed until the tears stood in her eyes. "William, you have more sense than I gave you credit for. But I am not sure that, as your Sunday-school teacher, I ought not to tell you to confess. Hullo! look what's coming."

Flare of banners! Prancing horses! Roman soldiers in rumbling gold-and-crimson chariots! Elephants bearing, throned upon their backs, goddesses of liberty and queens of beauty! Miss Harriet was leaning forward, her lips parted with excitement. William King looked at her and drew in his breath.