"Yes," said Ben unhappily, and was in the saddle looking down, more than ever reluctant to be going away. "I'll tell you after supper, what he says. Ru, what was that?—you started to say that if I sail, then you also—?"
Ben had spoken softly, in his confusion. He supposed Reuben had not heard, for he did not answer, and that was a discourtesy Ben had never known him to employ. Ben saw him rub his hand along Molly's fat neck. "Be a good horse," said Reuben, and was gone, walking quickly around the stable, the shortest way to the back fields.
The cottage with the green shutters sat comfortably under the dignity of twin elms—like its owner mild, and quiet, and rather old, carrying age as an elm does with rugged awkwardness, with many scars, without pomp and circumstance.
Reuben had learned the inside of the cottage—simple, on the same stark plan as the house in Deerfield, with two main downstairs rooms and a garret, but where the Deerfield house had owned a small lean-to off the kitchen, Mr. Welland had a larger annex, more solidly built, which he called the surgery. It was also his reception room for patients, his library, his study, his room of contemplation. The gray striped lady, Goody Snively, who kept the cottage rather constantly supplied with kittens (often yellow), lived here in a box of her own beside the wood-box at the fireplace. Very few patients ever came to Mr. Welland here at the cottage, so few that he did not try to keep precise hours for them, but it was understood that he would ordinarily be at home in the late hours of the afternoon. Most of his work was done in visits that often took him a considerable distance to outlying farms. A small stable stood separate from the cottage, home of the brown mare Meg, who carried Mr. Welland on his labors in all weathers, all times of day or night. He claimed that Meg was a better diagnostician of the purse than himself, being always restless outside the houses of wealthy patients, who were invariably the slowest to pay his charges. That puzzled Reuben. "You'll learn," said Mr. Welland. "Your great-uncle is one of perhaps five exceptions to the rule that I can remember."
Mr. Welland kept no servant, and no one came in to clean or cook for him. He took most of his meals at the ordinary down the street; messages were left for him there more often than at the cottage. In the cottage he maintained a monastic neatness—no dust, no clutter, very few possessions and those necessary, functional and in good order. "It's not difficult," he had explained on Reuben's first visit, "but a servant or woman-by-the-day would make it so, and by the way, Reuben, my house is never locked, this door from hall to surgery never closed except when I have a patient with me. I like simplicity, seeing it leaves one free to consider complexity—especially that of persons who a'n't so smart as you and me. Don't trouble to knock, I don't like it. I hate knocking. If it's loud I jump out of my skin, if it's soft I blame it on the mice." "Mice, with that cat?" "Mice is a general term, boy. Mice includes everything that bothers by day or goes thump in the night. If a door squeaks I blame it on the mice for a week before I oil it. Everyone needs a devil, Reuben, and mice have served me bravely in that capacity for lo, these many years. Pull up a chair and be at ease."
On this Tuesday afternoon Reuben entered without knocking, an action that still caused him some shy discomfort, and spoke Mr. Welland's name unanswered. The door to the surgery stood open; also the stable door, as Reuben noticed through the window; the doctor was away, and this new loneliness an unexpected blow. "I am most unreasonable," said Reuben to Goody Snively, who rubbed his leg, and purred, and exercised a cat's privilege of trotting ahead and sitting down in front of his feet as he was about to go into the surgery. Reuben hooked her on his shoulder; she sang casually and damply in his ear as he went to the doctor's bookshelves and took down the Vesalius.
"This is a man——" well, certainly, but also not a man. A man is motion and thought; a man is foolishness, courage, love, pain. Reuben turned the pages at the desk, rather blindly trying to force them into some clearness, and he wondered if there had been any truth at all in what he had said to Ben less than half an hour ago. Vesalius had not faded—that much was true. The mist is in the observer.
Not only now, he thought, but always, in every observation, whether made at a favorable time or not. If I were happy, that also could deceive, a rosy mist no easier to penetrate than a gray one. If I were calm, neither sad nor happy—still a mist, of accepted thoughts that may be false as fog over quicksand. "But don't you see, Goody Snively?—we know one thing: we know the fog is there. And that, by the way, is my tender thigh and not a tree trunk. If you regard me as a tree, I may bark." Goody Snively retired—shocked, maybe.
The drawing before his face was lost to him a while, the room also, in a trance not of thought but of stillness avoiding thought. Then, as the body itself will usually shatter such a refuge with its own cantankerous insistence, Reuben's nose itched, his hands upholding his cheekbones grew sweaty and cramped. He gave it up and wandered about disconsolately. He knelt by the box to which Goody Snively had returned. Her latest kittens were quite new, their open eyes not focusing, their legs uncertain. He lifted the black-and-brindle one of the four and held it against his cheek, liking the harmlessly wild kitten smell; it mewed in small wrath, and Goody Snively began to look stern, so he replaced it at the consolation of the nipple and strolled away. He leaned in the open doorway of the front room, the room where Mr. Welland slept. Curious, but somehow not inappropriate, that this room like the rest of the house should be bare of ornament. Monastic was the word, but it held a sense of comfort too. A plain narrow bed, made up with sharp precision. One armchair, much worn in the seat; beside that an unpainted table, bearing a Betty lamp, a pitcher and a basin, nothing else. Two pairs of shoes—so the doctor owned three altogether—lined up at the side of the bed like little soldiers. Reuben thought of his own five expensive pairs, of the days in Deerfield when he had not always owned two pairs, of time and change and human virtue, of the froth of bright embroidery Kate had stitched at the buttonholes of the fine maroon waistcoat he now wore, and shut his eyes, wondering if that enameled snuffbox was the doctor's only luxury.