THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE by James Lane Allen

Author:James Lane Allen [Allen, James Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788027222599
Publisher: Musaicum Books
Published: 2017-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

V. Evergreen and Thorn Tree

Table of Contents

Four months had elapsed since that August afternoon of summer heat and passion—not a lengthy period as reckoned on the mere unemotional calendar. But changes in our lives are not measurable by days: we may spend eventless years with no inner or outer sign of growth, and then some hour may bring a readjustment, an advancement, of our whole being. The oriental story of Saul of Tarsus, made a changed man by a voice or a vision of heavenly things, is human and natural, and for this reason if for no other has been credible to thousands of men—this reversal of direction on life's road.

As Dr. Birney now on the morning of this twenty-fourth of December sat in his library, trying to make out the bills of the year, and there lay disclosed before him the book of the years—the story of his life from boyhood up—he by and by abandoned the filling out of blanks against his professional neighbors and began to cast up as at the end of no previous year his own human debt to the better ideals of his fellow-beings—and to himself. And Nature, who was grievously in his debt but had no notion of paying, Nature stood at his shoulder and pressed him for settlement in that old formula of hers: you need not have opened this account with Nature, but since it has been opened, there is no closing it. It runs until you are declared bankrupt; and you are not bankrupt until you are dead. Then of course as a business firm I shall lose what I have not already collected from you; but there are enough others to keep the concern prosperous and going. Meantime—make a partial payment now : payment in suffering, payment in expiation, payment in self-repudiation. If you have any funds invested in a habit of inferiority, they are acceptable: I levy on them.

One particular fact this morning had riveted Dr. Birney's attention upon the slow inexorable grinding of these mills of life.

For years the unhappiness of his domestic affairs—the withdrawal of his wife from him under his roof—had by insensible stages travelled as a story to all other homesteads in that region. In his own house it had always remained a mute tragedy: each of the two who bore the yoke of it made no willing sign; each turned toward their world the unbetraying countenance. And it must be remembered that half a century ago and less you might have journeyed inquisitively through the length and breadth of that land and have found probably not one case of divorce nor of separation without divorce: among that people marriage was truly for better or for worse—a great binding and unalterable sacrament of blended lives. If after marriage love's young dream ended, then you lived on where you were—wide awake; if all gorgeous colors left the clouds and the clouds left the sky, you stood the blistering sun; if it turned out to be

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