V. V.'s Eyes

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

It was September now, the third night. At his office the doctor found two calls for him, noted on a scrap of brown wrapping-paper in the rudimentary hand of Mrs. Garland. He went out again, disappearing over the Hill into that quarter of the town which was less cheering than honest slums. Returning, about ten, he found the Dabney House entirely silent: all quiet from the direction of the sick-room. All quiet, too, in the tall bare office. Very quiet, indeed....

It was a strange-looking room to be a doctor's office; on the whole a strange-looking young man to be a doctor; no stereotyped thoughts, it may be, pounding through the head he held so fast between his hands. Strange entanglements were here, too, with the brilliant life over the Gulf: a life whose visible thread, it is easily surmised, will hardly lead us by this ancient secretary again.

He was all alone in the world; very much so. His father was dead; and his mother, who had married a penniless idealist for love, was dead these many years. Fifteen he was when she died ... a long time ago. And he had had nobody since. He had just been beginning to feel close to his Uncle Armistead, and now Uncle Armistead was dead, too. And he had no sisters or brothers. He had no wife or children....

He was alone, and by that token he was free. No tie bound up the hope of others in him. Had he felt the sting of youth's rage to make things better? No bond of another's claim withheld him from spending himself to the uttermost.

All this had long been clear. Long clear also were the two paths trod by the noble army, men and boys. There were those who preached a more abundant living; and there were those who lived that living.... A glorious thing, indeed, it was for a man so to go his quiet ways that he became an example and model to his fellows, who were made better in that their lives had touched his exemplary one. But here, alas, was an aspiration for the saints, not for weak men with known bitternesses and passions in their blood, and all youth's furies hot upon them. And surely in that other summons there was, besides, the thrill of romance, such as the young love. There was the trumpeting to high adventure. Few there were to touch, few to remember, even the saintliest life lived in a noble narrowness, a noble silence. But the word of truth, spoken from no matter what obscurity, will rise and ring round the world, and remain forever in the pattern of men's thought. Here, indeed, was a 'bliss to die with, dim-descried.'...

So it was that one boy had found his heroic ideal, long since, in the grim voice crying in the wilderness. And in the years the secret picture had grown very clear, curiously full of meaning. There was descried, like something remembered from another life, an innumerable company upon a rocky plain, a little river rushing by, and in the distance a City....

He had seen something of life in his time at the medical school, and before that, when he was still looking about, trying to decide what he should do. He had observed in these days of leisure, read, and burned. And he had come back to his old home-city, overflowing with fine passions, aflame with new-old secrets and forgotten truths. What speeches there had been to make in those days, what roaring things to write, what shouts to be flung from the house-tops!

And now he had been at home again over a year; he had been right here in the Dabney House a year this month. And what had he done for his faith?

He had done precisely what a weak man does, precisely what he had passionately resolved never to do. He had found life hard, and he had compromised with it. A minute routine pressed upon him, and he had suffered that routine to swamp his perspective, to drown out his fires. It was a good and useful work that he did: he never doubted that. To take the pain from a sick body, to put a coat on a bare back, this was worth a man's doing. But none knew better than he that that body would grow sick again, that back once more wear naked: and all the while the untouched causes of these wrongs festered and reinfected and spread, and a fig for your Settlements and your redoubled "relief." Was there not a bay-tree that flourished, and had he not been summoned in a vision to lay an axe to its roots? Behold, he gave his youth to spraying at the parasites upon a single small leaf.

And was it only the grinding round of work that had brought him to this compromise? Was it possible that personal considerations had seduced him, as Samuel O'Neill appeared to hint? That would be base, indeed....