The Doctor's Christmas Eve

by James Lane Allen

If the world should last until Kentucky passes out of history into the classic and the mythological; if Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road should become Orion and the Milky Way; if the capture of Betsy Calloway should become the rape of Lucrece; if the two gigantic Indian fighters, the Poe brothers, should establish their claim to the authorship of those Poems and Tales which even in our own time are beginning to fall away from a mythical personage,—hardly more than an emanation of darkness, perhaps this unique Kentucky gentleman who insisted upon being no one at all will exhibit his beaming face in the heavens of those ages as Charioteer to the Horses of the Sun.

The sole warrant for here disturbing his light repose under his patchwork of turf is that he had taken to his hearthstone and heart an orphan nephew, whose destiny it was to be profoundly influenced by the environment of heart and hearthstone: by this breeding of horses, by the method of training them; by that serene outlook upon the world and that gayety of nature which attracted happiness to it as naturally as the martin box in the yard drew the martins. Possibly even more influenced in the earlier years around that fireside where there was no women, no mother, no father, either; nor parent out of doors save the motherhood of the near earth and the fatherhood of the distant sky.

From the day when he arrived on that stock farm its influences began their work upon him and kept it up during years when he was not aware. But in his own memory the first event in the long series of events—the first scene of all the scenes that made his Progress—occurred when he was about fifteen years old. As the middle-aged man, sitting in his library that morning with the Book of the Years before him, reviewed his life, his memory went straight back to that event and stopped there as though it were the beginning. Of course it was not the beginning; of course he could not himself have known where the beginning was or what it was; but he did what we all do as we look back toward childhood and try to open a road as far as memory will reach,—we begin somewhere, and the doctor began with his fifteenth year—as the first scene of his Progress. But let that scene be painted not as the doctor saw it: more nearly as it was: he was too young to know all that it contained.

It was a balmy Saturday afternoon of early summer; and uncle and nephew were out in the yard of the white and lemon-colored manor house, enjoying the shade of some blossoming locust trees. The uncle was sitting in a yellow cane-bottom chair; and he had on a yellow nankeen waistcoat and trousers; so that the chair looked like an overgrown architectural harmony attached to his dorsal raiment; and he had on a pleated bosom shirt which had been polished by his negro laundress with iron and paraffine until it looked like a cake of winter ice marked off to be cut in slices. In the top button-hole was a cluster diamond pin which represented almost a star-system; and about his throat was tied a magenta cravat: that was the day for solferinos and magentas and Madeira wine. But the neck of the wearer of the cravat was itself turning to a gouty magenta; so that the ribbon, while appropriately selected, was as a color-sign superfluous. On the grass beside him lay his black alpaca coat and panama hat and gold-headed cane and red silk handkerchief and a piece of dry wood admirable for whittling.

He had been to a colt show that morning several miles across the country in a neighborhood where there was some turbulence; not the turbulence of the colts; and he had reached home just before dinner—glad to get there without turbulence; and the dinner had been good, and now he was experiencing that comfortable expansion of girth which turns even a pessimist toward optimism; that streaming benevolence of his countenance never streamed to better advantage.

He was reading his Saturday weekly newspaper, an entire page of which showed that this was a great thoroughbred breeding-region of the world. At the distance of several yards you could have inferred as much by the character of the advertisements, each of which was headed by the little black wood-cut of a stallion. The page was blackened by this wood-cut as it repeated itself up and down, column after column. Whether the stallion were sorrel or roan or bay or chestnut or black—one wood-cut stood for all. There was one other wood-cut for jacks—all jacks.

In the same way one little wood-cut in an earlier generation had been used to stand for runaway slaves: a negro with a stick swung across his shoulder and with a bundle dangling from the stick down his fugitive back; one wood-cut for all slaves. If you saw between the legs of the figure, it was a man; if you did not—it was the other figure of man's fate in slavery.

The turfman read every item of his newspaper, having first with a due sense of proportion cast his eye on the advertisement of his own stud.

The nephew was lying on the grass near by, wearing a kind of dove-colored suit; so that from a distance he might have been taken for a huge mound of vegetable mould; he having just awakened from a nap: a heavy, rank, insolent, human cub with his powers half pent up and half unfolded, except a fully developed insolence toward all things and people except his uncle, himself, and his friend, Fred Ousley. He rolled drowsily about on the soft turf, waiting to take his turn at the newspaper: it was the only thing he read: otherwise he was too busy reading the things of life on the farm. Once he stretched himself on his back, looking upward for anything and everything in sight. The light breeze swung the boughs of the locust, now heavily draped with blossoms; and soon his eyes began to follow what looked like a flame darting in and out amid the snowy cascades of bloom—a flame that was vocal and that dropped down upon his ear crimson petals of song—the Baltimore oriole.

He liked all birds but three; and presently one of those that he disliked appeared in a fork of a locust and darted at the oriole, driving it away and then returning to the fork—the blue-jay. His hatred of this bird dated from the time when one of the negroes had told him that no blue-jays could be seen at twelve o'clock on Friday—all having gone to carry brimstone to the lower regions. After that he and Fred Ousley had made a point of trying to kill jays early Friday morning: a fatally shied stone would cut off to a dead certainty just so much of that supply of brimstone. He hated them even more on Saturday, when he thought of them as having returned. The one in the fork now was looking down at him, and, with a great mockery of bowing, called out his Fiddle-Fiddle-Fiddle: it was his way of saying: "You'll get there: and there will be brimstone, sonny!"