"You tell me that you have tried a method of training and that it is a failure. I don't wonder: any training would be a failure that made it the chief business in life of any creature – human or brute – to fix its mind upon what it is not to do. You say you are always warning your boys; that you fill their minds with cautions; that you arouse their imagination with pictures of forbidden things; make them look at life as a check, a halter, a blind bridle. So far as I can discover, you have prepared a list of the evil traits of humanity and required your boys to memorize these: and then you tell them to beware. Is that it?"
"That is exactly it."
The youth lying on the grass laid aside his newspaper and began to listen. The two men welcomed his attention. The minister always found it difficult to speak without a congregation – part of which must be sinners: here was an occasion for outdoor preaching. The turfman probably welcomed this chance to get before the youth in an indirect way certain suggestions which he relied upon for his: —
"Well, that is where your training and my training differ," he resumed. "I never assemble my colts at the barn door – that is, I would not if I could – and recite to them the vicious traits of the wild horse and require them to memorize those traits and think about them unceasingly, but never to imitate them. Speaking of jacks, Aleck, you know our neighbor stands a jack. And he would not if he could compel his jack to make a study of the peculiarities of Balaam's ass. But you compel your boys to make a study of Balaam and his tribes. You teach them the failings of mankind as they revealed themselves in an age of primitive transgression. I say I never try to train a horse that way. On the contrary I try to let all the ancestral memories slumber, and I take all the ancestral powers and develop them for modern uses. Why, listen. We know that a horse's teeth were once useful as a weapon to bite its enemies. Now I try to give it the notion that its teeth are only useful in feeding. You know that its hoofs were used to strike its enemies: it stood on its forefeet and kicked in the rear; it stood on its hind feet and pawed in front. You know that the horse is timid, it is born timid, dies timid; but had it not been timid, it would have been exterminated: its speed was one of its means of survival: if it could not conquer, it had to flee and the sentinel of its safety was its fear; it was the most valuable trait it had; this ancestral trait has not yet been outlived; don't despise the horse for it. But now I try to teach a horse that feet and legs and speed are to serve another instinct – the instinct to win in the new maddened courage of the race-course. And I never allow the horse to believe that it has such a thing as an enemy. He is not to fear life, but to trust life. I teach him that man is not his old hereditary enemy, but his friend – and his master. I would not suggest to a horse any of its latent bad traits. I never prohibit its doing anything. I never try to teach it what not to do, but only what to do. And so I have good colts, and you have – but excuse me!"
The minister stood up and brushed the shavings from his lap and legs; then as he took his seat he covered his side of the discussion with one breath: —
"I hold to the old teaching – good from the foundation of the world – that the old must tell the young what not to do."
"Aleck," replied the vicar of the stables with his quaint sunniness, "don't you know that no human being can teach any living thing – man or beast or bird or fish or flea —not to do a thing? you can only teach to do. If there is a God of this universe, He is a God of doing. You can no more teach 'a not' than you can teach 'a nothing.' Now try to teach one of your sons nothing! This world has never taught, and will never teach, a prohibition, because a prohibition is a nothing; it has never taught anything but the will and desire to do: that is the root of the matter. Do you suppose I try to keep one of my cows from kicking over the bucket of milk by tying her hind legs? I go to the other end of the beast and do something for her brain so that when she feels the instinct to kick which is her right, what I have taught her will compel her to waive her right and to keep her feet on the ground. That is all there is of it."
They were hearty and good-humored in their talk, and the minister did not budge: but the boy listened only to his uncle.
"Do you remember, Aleck, when you and I were in the school over yonder and one morning old Bowles issued a new order that none of us boys was to ask for a drink between little recess and big recess? Now none of us drank at that hour; but the day after the order was issued, every boy wanted a drink, and demanded a drink, and got a drink. It was thirst for principle. Every boy knew it was his right to drink whenever he was thirsty – and even when he was not thirsty; and he disobeyed orders to assert that right. And if old Bowles had not lowered his authority before that advancing right, there would not have been any old Bowles. There is one thing greater than any man's authority, and that is any man's right. Isn't that the United States? Wasn't that Kentucky country school-house the United States? And don't you know, Aleck, that as soon as a thing is forbidden, human nature investigates the command to see whether it puts forth an infringement of its liberties? Don't you know, Aleck, that the disobedience of children may be one of their natural rights?"
At this point the uncle turned unexpectedly toward his nephew: —
"Does this bore you, Downs?"
Downs remarked pointedly that half of it bored him: he made it perfectly clear which was the objectionable half.
The uncle did not notice the discourtesy to his guest, but continued his amiable observation: —
"To me it all leads up to this – and now the road turns away from colts to the road you and I walk in as men. It leads up to this: the difference between failure and transgression. Command to do; and the worst result can only be failure. Command not to do; and the worst result is transgression. Now we all live on partial failure: it is the beginning of effort and the incentive to effort. We try and fail; with more will and strength and experience we wipe out the failure and stand beyond it. Long afterwards men look back and laugh at their failures, love them because they are the measure of what they were and of what they have become. It is our life, the glory of more strength, the triumph of will and determination. It is the crowning victory of the world. And it is the road that leads upward.
"But transgression! No transgression ever develops life; it is so much death. You can't wrest victory out of transgression: it's a thing by itself – a final defeat. And what has been defeated is your last safeguard – your will. Every transgression helps to kill the will. It weakens, discourages, humiliates, stings, poisons. The road of transgression is downward."
He stood up, and his guest with him. As he lifted his alpaca coat from the grass and put it on, there was left lying his bowie-knife, and he put that on. It was the bowie-knife age.
"Will you come with us, Downs?"
Downs thought he would now read the newspaper.
"Where is Fred Ousley?" asked the minister of him, knowing that the two boys were inseparable.
"He has gone to a picnic."
"Why didn't you go to the picnic?"
"I wasn't invited: it's his cousins'."
"And haven't you any cousins who give picnics?"
"I don't like my cousins: I hate my cousins: Fred hates his cousins: it's a girl that goes with his cousins."
"And what about a girl with your cousins?"
"Well, while you're talking, what about your sons and their cousins? We're running this farm very well, and we're all pleased. From what I have been hearing, it's more than can be said about yours."
The minister laughed good-naturedly at this rudeness as the two friends walked away; but the vicar of the stables observed mildly: —
"You gave him the wrong kind of suggestion, Aleck. It wasn't in your words exactly; I don't know where it was; but I felt it and he felt it: somehow you challenged him to employ his manly art of self-defence; and part of that art is to attack. But never mind about Downs. Now come to the stable: I am going to show you a young thoroughbred there that has never had a disagreeable suggestion made to him: he thinks this farm paradise. And the five great things I tried to teach him are: to develop his will, to develop his speed, to develop his endurance and perseverance, to develop his pride, and to develop his affection: he is a masterpiece."
In the green yard that summer afternoon, under the white locust blossoms and with the fragrance of rose and honeysuckle and lilac all about him, the youth lay on the grass beside the newspaper – which he forgot. A new world of thinking had been disclosed to him. And he made one special discovery: that as far as memory could reach his uncle had never told him not to do anything: always it had been to do – never not to do.
And he was a good deal impressed with the difference between failure and transgression. He did not at all like that idea of transgression; but he thought he should like to try failure for a while; then he could call on more strength, tighten his will, develop more fighting power. He rather welcomed that combat with failure which would end in success.
He wished Fred were there. It was Saturday he came to stay all night; and the two were getting old enough to talk about their futures and at what ages each would marry. They described the desirable type of woman; and sometimes exchanged descriptions.
And then suddenly he rolled over the grass convulsed with laughter: his uncle was raising him as a thoroughbred colt. He approved of the training, but somehow he did not feel complimented by the classification. Fred would have to hear that – that he was being trained as for a race-course.
The next morning he was sitting in church; and the minister read the Commandments.
Hitherto he had always listened to them as the whole congregation apparently listened: as to a noise from the pulpit that drew near, lasted for a while, and then rumbled on – without being meant for any one. But this morning he scrutinized each Commandment with new thoughtfulness – and with a new resentfulness also; and when a certain one was reached he made a discovery that it applied to men only: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."
Why should not wives be commanded not to covet their neighbors' husbands? he wondered. Why was the other half of the Commandment suppressed? Moses must have been a very polite man! Perhaps there was more involved than courtesy: otherwise he might have found life more tolerable among the Egyptians: he might have been forced to make the return trip across the Red Sea when the waters were inconveniently deep. Those Jewesses of the Wandering might have seen to it that he was not to have the pleasure of dying so mysteriously on Nebo's lonely mountain: his sepulchre would have been marked – and well marked.
He sat there in the corner of the church, and plied his insolent satire. Fred Ousley must hear about the second discovery also – the Commandment for men only.
Then three years passed and he was eighteen; and from fifteen to eighteen is a long time in youth's life; things are much worse or things are much better.
It was one rainy September night after supper, and he and his uncle were sitting on opposite sides of the deep fireplace.
Some logs blazed comfortably, and awoke in both man and youth the thoughtfulness which lays such a silence upon us with the kindling of the earliest Autumn fires. Talk between them was never forced. It came, it went: they were at perfect ease with one another in their comradeship. The man's long thoughts went backward; the youth's long thoughts went forward. The man was smoking, at intervals serenely drawing his amber-hued meerschaum from under his thick mustache. The youth was not smoking – he was waiting to be a man. Once his uncle had remarked: "Tobacco is for men if they wish tobacco, and for pioneer old ladies if they must have their pipes. Begin to smoke after you are a man, Downs. Cigars for boys are as bad as cigars would be for old ladies."
The way in which this had been put rather captured the youth's fancy: he was determined to have every inward and outward sign of being a man: now he was waiting for the cigar.
He had been hunting with Fred Ousley that afternoon, and just before dark had come in with a good bag of birds. A drizzle of rain had overtaken him in the fields and dampened his clothing. The truth is that he and Ousley had lingered over their good-by; Fred was off for college. Supper was over when he reached the house, and he had merely washed his hands and gone in to supper as he was, eating alone; and now as he sat gazing into the fire, his boots and his hunting-trousers and his dark blue flannel shirt began to steam. He was too much a youth to mind wet garments.
The man on the opposite side sent secret glances across at him: they were full of pride, of a man's idolatry of a scion of his own blood. He was thinking of the blood of that family – blood never to be forced or hurried: death rather than being commanded: rage at being ordered: mingled of Scotch and Irish and Anglo-Saxon – with the Kentucky wildness and insolence added. Blood that often wallowed in the old mires of humanity; then later in life by a process of unfolding began to set its course toward the virtues of the world and ultimately stood where it filled lower men with awe.
September was the month for the opening of schools and colleges. The boy's education had been difficult and desultory. First he had gone to the neighborhood school, then to a boys' select school, then to a military school, then to a college. Usually he quit and came home. Once he had joined his uncle in another State at the Autumn meeting of a racing association – had merely walked up to him on the grounds, eating purple grapes out of a paper bag and with his linen trousers pockets bulging with ripe peaches.
"Well, Downs," his uncle observed by way of greeting him, as though he had reappeared round a corner.
"Who won the last race?" inquired the boy as though he had been absent ten minutes.
Now out of the silence of the rainy September night and out of the thoughtfulness of the fire, the imperious splendid dark glowing young animal steaming in his boots and flannel suddenly looked across and spoke: —
"If I am ever going to do anything, it is about time I began."
The philosopher on the other side of the fire grew wary; he had given the blood time, and now the blood was mounting to the brain.
"It is time, if you think it is time."
"One thing I am not going to do," said the arbiter of his fate, as if he were drawing a surprise from the depths of his nature and were offering it to his uncle; if possible, without discourtesy, but certainly without discussion – "one thing I am not going to do; I am not going to breed horses."
The fire crackled, and no other sound disturbed the stillness.
"Some one else will breed them," replied the vicar of the stables, with quietness: the sun always seemed to remain on his face after it had gone down. "They will be bred by some one else. The breeding of horses in the world will not be stopped because some one does not wish to breed them. It will come to the same thing in the end. Even if it does not come to the same thing, it will come to something different. No matter, either way."
The young hunter had unbuttoned one of his shirt sleeves and bared his arm above the elbow; and he now stroked his forearm as he bent it backward over the biceps and suddenly struck out at the air as though he would knock the head off of an idea.
"My notion is this: I don't want to stand still and let my horse do the running. If I have a horse, I want it to stand still and let me do the running. If there is any excitement for either of us, I want the excitement. I don't care to own an animal that wins a race: I want to be the animal that wins a race."
"Then be the animal that wins the race! The horse will win his races: he will take care of himself: win your race."
"I intend to win my race."
There was silence for a while.
"As it is not to be horses, then, I have been thinking of other things I might do."
"Keep on thinking."
"You might help me to think."
"I am ready to think with you; you can only think for yourself."
"What about going into the army?"
"You just said you wanted excitement. There is no excitement in the army unless there is war. We have just passed through one war, and I don't think either of us will live to see another. Still, if you wish, I can get you to West Point. Or, if you prefer the navy, I can get you to Annapolis."
"No Annapolis for me! I wouldn't live on anything that I couldn't walk about on and sit down on and roll over on. No water for me. I'll take land all round me in every direction. I guess I'll leave the sea to the Apostle Peter. Life on land and death on land for me. Hard showers and streams and ponds and springs – that will do for water. No Annapolis, thank you!"
"West Point, then."
"If I went into the army, wouldn't I have to leave the farm here?"
"You'd have to leave the farm here unless the Government would quarter some troops here for your accommodation. In case of war, you might arrange with the enemy to come to Kentucky and attack you where you would be comfortable."
The future officer of his country did not smile at this: his manner seemed to indicate that such a concession might not be so absurd. He did not budge from his position: —
"I'd rather do something that would let me live here."
"You could live here and study law: some of the greatest members of the Kentucky bar have been farmers. You could live here and practise law in the country seat."
"Suppose I studied law and then some day I were called to the Supreme Bench: wouldn't that take me away?"
"It might take you away unless the Supreme Court would get down from its Bench and come and sit on your bench – always to accommodate you."
"I don't know about law: I'll have to think: law does make you think!"
"There is the pulpit: some of the greatest Kentucky divines have been bluegrass farmers – though I've always wished that they wouldn't call themselves divines. It's more than Christ did!"
"The pulpit! And then all my life I'd be thinking of other people's faults and failings. A fine time I'd have, trying to chase my friends to hell."
The next suggestion followed in due order.
"There's Oratory; some of the great Kentucky orators have been bluegrass farmers. There is Southern Oratory."
"Oratory – where would I get my gas?"
"Manufacture it. It always has to be manufactured. The consumer always manufactures."
"If I went in for oratory, you know I'd come out in Congress; you know they always do: then no farm for me again."
"That is, unless – you know, Congress might adjourn and hold its sessions – that same idea – to accommodate you – !"
"I'd like to be a soldier and I'd like to be a farmer, if I could get the two professions together."
"They went together regularly in pioneer Kentucky. The soldiers were farmers and the farmers were soldiers."
"And then if I could be a doctor. That's what I'd like best. To be a soldier and a farmer and a doctor."
"Men were all three in pioneer Kentucky. During the period of Indian wars the Kentucky farmer and soldier, who was the border scout, was also sometimes the scout of Æsculapius."
"Æsculapius – who was he? Trotter, runner, or pacer?"
"He set the pace: you might call him a pacer."
What a sense of deep peace and security and privacy there was in the two being thus free to talk together of life and the world – in that womanless house! No woman sitting beside the fire to interject herself and pull things her way; or to sit by without a sign – and pull things her way afterwards – without a sign.
The physical comfort of the night, and the rain, and the snug hearth awoke a desire for more confidences.
"Tell me about the medical schools when you were a student. Not about the professors. I don't want to hear anything about the professors. You wouldn't know anything about them, anyhow: no student ever does. But what were the students up to among themselves at nights? The wild ones. I don't want to hear anything about the goody-goody ones. Tell me about the devils – the worst of the devils."
The medical schools of those days, as members of the profession yet living can testify if they would, had their stories of student life that make good stories when recited around the fireside with September rain on the roof. The former graduate and non-practitioner was not averse seemingly to reminiscence. Forthwith he entered upon some chronicles and pursued them with that soft, level voice of either betting with you or baptizing you – the voice of gambling in this world or of gambling for the next.
As the recitals wound along their channels, the listener's enthusiasm became stirred: by degrees it took on a kindling that was like a wild leaping flame of joy.
"But there always has to be a leader," he said, as though forecasting for himself a place of such splendid prominence. "There has to be a leader, a head."
"I was the head."
The young hunter on the opposite side of the fireplace suddenly threw up his arms and rolled out of his chair and lay on the floor as though he had received a charge of buckshot in one ear. At last, gathering himself up on the floor, he gazed at the tranquil amber pipe and tranquil piper: —
"You!"
There was a mild wave of the hand by the historian of the night, much as one puts aside a faded wreath, deprecating being crowned with it a second time.
"Another shock like that – !" and the searcher for a profession climbed with difficulty into his chair again. For a while there was satisfied silence, and now things took on a graver character: —
"Somehow I feel," said the younger of the men, "that there have been great men all about here. I don't see any now; but I have a feeling that they have been here – great men. I feel them behind me – all kinds of great men. It is like the licks where we now find the footprints and the bones of big game, larger animals that have vanished. There are the bones of greater men in Kentucky: I feel their lives behind me."
"They are behind you: the earth is rank with them. You need not look anywhere else for examples. I don't know how far you got in your Homer at school before you were tired of it; but there is the Iliad of Kentucky: I am glad you have begun to read that!"
The rain on the shingles and in the gutters began to sound like music. The two men alone there in their talk about life, not a woman near, a kind of ragged sublimity.
"To be a soldier and to be a farmer – if I could get those two professions together," persisted the youth.
"In times of peace there is only one profession that furnishes the active soldier: and that is the profession of medicine. It is the physician and the surgeon that the military virtues rest on; and the martial traits when there is no war. It is these men that bring those virtues and those traits undiminished from one war to the next war. There is no kind of manhood in the soldier, the fighting man, that is not in the fighting physician and fighting surgeon – fighting against disease. There is nothing that has to be changed in these two when war breaks out or when peace comes: their constant service fits them for either. In times of peace the only warlike type of man actively engaged in human life is the doctor and surgeon. Did you ever think of that?" said the older man, persuasively.
The silence in the room grew deeper.
"Tell me about the professions in the War: what did they do about it; how did they act?"
"The professions divided: some going with North, some going with South; fighting on each side, fighting one another. The ministry dividing most bitterly and sending up their prayers on each side for the destruction of the other – to the same God. All except one: the profession of medicine remained indivisible. For that is the profession which has but a single ideal, a single duty, a single work, and but one patient – Man."
The silence had become too deep for words.
The young hunter quietly got up and lit his candle and squared himself in the middle of the floor, pale with the sacred fire of a youth's ideal.
"I am going to be a Kentucky country doctor. Good night!" He strode heavily out of the room, and his stride on the stairway sounded like an upward march toward future glory.
The man at the fire listened. Usually when the youth had reached his room above and set his candle on his stand beside his bed, he undressed there as with one double motion of shucking an ear of corn: half to right and half to left; and then the ear stood forth bared in its glistening whiteness and rounded out to perfect form with clean vitality. But now for a long time he heard a walking back and forth, a solemn tread: life's march had begun in earnest.
He rose from his chair and tapped the ash out of his meerschaum. Through force of habit and old association with the race-course he looked at his timepiece.
"I win that race in good time," he said. "That colt was hard to manage, obstreperous and balky."
It had always been his secret wish that his nephew would enter the profession that he himself had spurned. Perhaps no man ever ceases to have some fondness for the profession he has declined, as perhaps a woman will to the last send some kind thoughts toward the man she has rejected.
After winning a race, he always poured out a libation; and he went to his sideboard now and poured out a libation sixteen years old.
And he did not pour it on the ground.
And now eight years followed, during which the youth Downs Birney became young Dr. Birney – a very great stage of actual progress. Seven away from Kentucky, and one there since his return. Of those seven, five in New York for a degree; and two in Europe – in Berlin, in Vienna – for more lectures, more hospital work, another degree. At the end of the second he returned incredibly developed to Kentucky, to the manor house and the stock farm; and to the uncle to whom these years had furnished abundance of means whereby to get the best of all that was wisely to be gotten: an affectionate abundance, no overfond super-abundance, no sentimentality: merely a quiet Kentucky sun throwing the energy of its rays along that young life-track – hanging out a purse of gold at each quarter-stretch, to be snatched as the thoroughbred passed.
A return home then to a neighborhood of kinships and friendships and to the uphill work which could so easily become downhill sliding – the practice of medicine among a people where during these absences he had been remembered, if remembered at all, as the wildest youth in the country. When it had been learned what profession he had chosen, the prediction had been made that within a year Downs would reduce the mortality of the neighborhood to normal – one to every inhabitant!
But at the end of this first year of undertaking to convert ridicule into acceptance of himself as a stable health officer and confidential health guardian, he was able to say that he had made a good start: neighbors have long memories about a budding physician's first cases – when he fails. Young Dr. Birney had not failed, because none of his cases had been important: when there was danger, it was considered safe to avoid the doctor: the only way in which he could have lost a patient would have been to murder one! Thus he had entered auspiciously upon the long art and science of securing patients. But he had secured no wife! And he greatly preferred one impossible wife to all possible patients. That problem meantime had been pressing him sorely.
The womanless house in which he had been reared and his boyhood on a stock farm had rendered him rather shy of girls and kept him much apart from the society of the neighborhood. Nevertheless even in Europe before his return – with the certainty of marriage before him – he had recalled two or three juvenile perturbations, and he had resolved upon arrival to follow these clues and ascertain what changes seven years had wrought in them. There was no difficulty in following the clues a few weeks after getting back to Kentucky: they led in each case to the door of a growing young family: and out of these households he thereupon began to receive calls for his services to sick children: all the perturbations had become volcanoes, and were now on their way to become extinct craters.
So he was clueless. He must make his own clues and then follow. Nor could there be any dallying, since he could not hope to succeed in his profession as a young unmarried physician: thus pressure from without equalled pressure from within.
Moreover, he was pleasantly conscious of a general commotion of part of the population toward him with reference to life's romance. The girls of that race and land were much too healthy and normally imaginative not to feel the impact of the arrival of a young doctor – who was going to ask one of them to marry him. As to those seven years of his in New York and Europe, he could discover only one mind in them: they deplored his absence not because they had missed him, but because he had missed them: it was no gain to have been in New York and Berlin and Vienna if you lost Kentucky! He gradually acquired the feeling that if in addition to the misfortune of having been absent for several years, the calamity had been his of having been born abroad, it would not have been permitted him to plough corn.
But while they could not abet him in the error of thinking that he had returned a cosmopolitan, bringing high prestige, instantly they showed general excitement that he – one of themselves – was at home again in search of a wife. He had arrived like a starving bee released in a ripe vineyard; and for a while he could only whirl about, distracted by indecision as to what cluster of grapes he should settle on: not that the grapes did not have something to say as to the privilege of alighting. After the bee had selected the bunch, the bunch selected the bee. A vineyard ripe to be gathered – and being gathered! Every month or so a vine disappeared – claimed for Love's vintage – stored away in Love's cellar.