The Calling of Dan Matthews | Page 6

was mounted, "take these along."
He accepted graciously without hesitation, and by this the Doctor knew
that their fellowship was firmly established. "Oh, thank you! Mother is
so fond of bass, and so are father and all of us. This is plenty for a good
meal." Then, with another smile, "Mother likes to fish, too; she taught
me."
The Doctor looked at him wistfully as he gathered up the reins, then
burst forth eagerly with, "Look here, why can't you come back
tomorrow? We'll have a bully time. What do you say?"
He lowered his hand. "Oh, I would like to." Then for a moment he
considered, gravely, saying at last, "I think I can meet you here day
after tomorrow. I am quite sure father and mother will be glad for me to
come when I tell them about you."
Was ever a fat old Doctor so flattered? It was not so much the boy's
words as his gracious manner and the meaning he unconsciously put
into his exquisitely toned voice.
He had turned his pony's head when the old man shouted after him
once more. "Hold on, wait a moment, you have not told me your name.
I am Dr. Oldham from Corinth. I am staying at the Thompson's down
the river."

"My name is Daniel Howitt Matthews," he answered. "My home is the
old Matthews place on the ridge above Mutton Hollow."
Then he rode away up the winding Fall Creek trail.
The Doctor spent the whole of the next day near the spot where he had
met the boy, fearing lest the lad might come again and not find him. He
even went a mile or so up the little creek half expecting to meet his
young friend, wondering at himself the while, that he could not break
the spell the lad had cast over him. Who was he? He had told the
Doctor his name, but that did not satisfy. Nor, indeed, did the question
itself ask what the old man really wished to know. The words
persistently shaped themselves--What is he? To this the physician's
brain made answer clearly enough--a boy, a backwoods boy, with
unusual beauty and strength of body, and uncommon fineness of mind;
yet with all this, a boy.
But that something that sits in judgment upon the findings of our brain,
and, in lofty disregard of us, accepts or rejects our most profound
conclusions, refused this answer. It was too superficial. It was not, in
short, an answer. It did not in any way explain the strange power that
this lad had exerted over the Doctor.
"Me," he said to himself, "a hard old man calloused by years of
professional contact with mankind and consequent knowledge of their
general cussedness! Huh! I have helped too many hundreds of children
into this world, and have carried too many of them through the measles,
whooping-cough, chicken-pox and the like to be so moved by a mere
boy."
The Thompsons could have told him about the lad and his people, but
the Doctor instinctively shrank from asking them. He felt that he did
not care to be told about the boy--that in truth no one could tell him
about the boy, because he already knew the lad as well as he knew
himself. Indeed the feeling that he already knew the boy was what
troubled the Doctor; more, that he had always lived with him; but that
he had never before met him face to face. He felt as a blind man might
feel if, after living all his life in closest intimacy with someone, he were

suddenly to receive his sight and, for the first time, actually look upon
his companion's face.
In the years that have passed since that day the Doctor has learned that
the lad was to him, not so much a mystery as a revelation--the
revelation of an unspoken ideal, of a truth that he had always known
but never fully confessed even to himself, and that lies at last too
deeply buried beneath the accumulated rubbish of his life to be of any
use to him or to others. In the boy he met this hidden, secret,
unacknowledged part of himself, that he knows to be the truest, most
precious and most sacred part, and that he has always persistently
ignored even while always conscious that he can no more escape it than
he can escape his own life. In short, Dan Matthews is to the Doctor that
which the old man feels he ought to have been; that which he might
have been, but never now can be.
It was still early in the forenoon of the following day when the Doctor
heard a cheery hail, and the boy came riding out of the brush of the
little