The Doctor's Christmas Eve. Allen James Lane
how to breathe!" Judging from Elsie's expression, the lambs in the case could not have thought very highly of this queer and genial Dr. Buck.
"But they are all four-legged creatures, Elsie; and they breathe backward and forward; if you are a two-legged animal and stand up straight, you breathe up and down: it's quite different! It's easier!"
"Then I suppose the fewer legs a thing has, the harder it is to get its breath. And I suppose if we ventured to stand on one leg, we'd all soon suffocate! Dear me! why don't all one-legged people die at once!"
The lad looked over the field of war on which it would seem that he was being mowed down by small-gun fire before he could get his father's heavy artillery into action. He decided to terminate the wordy engagement, a prudential manœuvre of the wiser head but slower tongue.
"Father is right," he declared. His manner of speaking was sturdy and decisive: it was meant to remind her first that he had enough gallantry as a male to permit her to crowd him out of the path; but that the moment a struggle for mental footing arose between them, he reserved the whole road: the female could take to the weeds! He notified her also that he stood with his father not only in this puzzling question of legs and parlous types of respiration, but that the men in the family were regularly combined against the women – like good organized against evil!
But now something further had transpired. Had there been present on the winter fields that morning an ear trained to separate our complex human tones into simple ones – to disengage one from another the different fibres of meaning which always make up even the slenderest tendril of sound (as there is a cluster of grapes to a solitary stem), it might, as it noted one thing, have discovered another. While the boy asserted his father to be right in the matter they were debating, there escaped from him an accent of admission that his father was wrong – wrong in some far graver affair which was his discovery and his present trouble.
Therefore his voice, which should have been buoyant, for the instant was depressed; and his face, which should have been a healthy boy's happy face, was overcast as by a foreign interference. You might have likened it to a small luminary upon the shining disk of which a larger body, traversing its darkened orbit, has just begun to project a wavering shadow. And thus some patient astronomer of our inter-orbited lives, sweeping the spiritual heavens for signs of its pendent mysteries, here might have arrested his telescope to watch the portent of a celestial event: was there to take place the eclipse of a son by a father?
Certainly at least this weight of responsibility on the voice must have caused it to strike only the more winningly upon any hearer. It was such a devoted, loyal voice when he thus spoke of his father, with a curious quavering huskiness of its own, as though the bass note of his distant manhood were already beginning to clamor to be heard.
The voice of the little girl contrariwise was a shrill treble. Had you first become aware of it at your back, you must instantly have wheeled to investigate the small creature it came from, as a wild animal quickly turns to face any sound that startles its instincts. Voltaire might have had such a voice if he had been a little girl. Yet to look at her, you would never have imagined that anything but the honey of speech could have dripped from so perfect a little rose. (Many surprises await mankind behind round amiable female faces: shrews are not all thin.)
Instead of being silenced by her brother's ultimatum, she did not deign to notice it, but continued to direct her voluble satire at her father – quite with the air of saying that a girl who can satirize a parent is not to be silenced by a son.
"… forever telling us that American children must have the newest and best way of doing everything… My, my, my! The working of our jaws! And the drinking and the breathing; and the stretching and the bending: developing everything we have – and everything we haven't! I am even trying now to find an original American way to go to sleep at night and to wake up in the morning! Dear me, but old people can be silly without knowing it!" She laughed with much self-approval.
For Elsie had already entered into one of mankind's most dependable recreations – the joy of listening to our own words: into that economic arrangement of nature whereby whatsoever a human being might lose through the vocal cords is returned to the owner along the auditory nerve! So that a woman can eat her colloquial cake times over: and each time, having devoured it, can return it to the storeroom and have it brought out as whole and fresh as ever – sometimes actually increased in size. And a man can send his vocal Niagara through his whirlpool rapids and catch it again above the falls! The more gold the delver unearths, the more he can empty back into the thinking mine. One can sit in his own cranial theatre and produce his own play: he can be stage and orchestra, audience and critic; and he can see that the claque does not get drowsy and slack: it never does – in this case!
The child now threw back her round winter-rose of a face and started along the path with a fresh outburst of speed and pride. Access of impertinence seemed to have released in her access of vitality. Perhaps it had. Perhaps it always does. Perhaps life itself at the full is sheer audacity.
The lad scrambled roughly along, and merely repeated the words that sufficed for him: —
"Father knows."
Suddenly he gave a laughing outcry, and stood still.
"Look!" he called out, with amusement at his plight.
He had run into some burdock, and the nettles had stuck to his yarn stockings like stinging bees – a cluster of them about his knees and calves. He drew off his gloves, showing the strong, overgrown hands of boyhood: they, like his voice, seemed impatiently reaching out for maturity.
When he overtook his companion, who had not stopped, he had transferred a few of the burrs to his skull cap. He had done this with crude artistry – from some faint surviving impulse of primitive man to decorate his body with things around him in nature: especially his head (possibly he foresaw that his head would be most struck at). The lad was pleased with his caper; and, smiling, thrust his head across her path, expecting her to take sympathetic notice. He had reason to expect this, because on dull rainy days at home he often amused her with the things he did and the things he made: for he was a natural carpenter and toy-maker. But now she took only the contemptuous notice of disapproval. This morning her mind was intent on playthings of positive value: she was a little travelling ten-toed pagoda of holiday greed. Every Christmas she prepared for its celebration with a balancing eye to what it would cost her and what it would bring in: she always calculated to receive more than she gave: for Elsie, the Nativity must be made to pay!
He resented her refusal to approve his playfulness by so much as a smile, and he came back at her by doing worse: —
"Why didn't I think to bring all the burrs along and make a Christmas basket for Elizabeth? Now what will I give her?"
This drew out a caustic comment quickly enough: —
"Poor Elizabeth!"
A child resents injustice with a blow or rage or tears: the old have learned to endure without a sign – waiting for God's day of judgment (or their first good opportunity!).
He was furious at the way she said "Poor Elizabeth" – as though Elizabeth's hands would be empty of gifts from him.
"You know I have bought my presents for Elizabeth, Elsie!" he exclaimed. "But Elizabeth thinks more of what I make than of what I buy," he continued hotly. "And the less it is worth, the more she values it. But you can't understand that, Elsie! And you needn't try!"
The little minx laughed with triumph that she had incensed him.
"I don't expect to try!" she retorted blithely. "I don't see that I'd gain anything, if I did understand. You and Elizabeth are a great deal too – "
He interrupted overbearingly: —
"Leave Elizabeth out! Confine your remarks to me!"
"My remarks will be wholly unconfined," said Elsie, as she trotted forward.
He scrambled alongside in silent rage. Perhaps he was thinking of his inability to reach protected female license. He may obscurely have felt that life's department of justice was being balked at the moment by its department of natural history – a not