Chapter VII: Book TWO: Note I (2)

The judge talks as we drink and his talk is something new to my ears. These are not the words or thoughts of the towns, the city factories or the sports of the race tracks. All of the judge’s talk is a laughing, half-cynical, half-earnest kind of confession. Were the things the judge told me of himself true? They were no doubt as true as these confessions of myself and my own relations to life I am setting down here. What I mean is that he was at least trying to inject into them the essence of truth.

I drank of the whisky sparingly, not so much through fear of being convicted of piggishness by getting drunk as from a desire to hear all the judge might have to say.

At the barn when he came there to loaf with the others during the winter afternoons the judge usually remained silent and managed always to achieve an effect of wisdom by the good-natured but cynical expression of his face and eyes. He sat with his fat white hands folded over his round neatly-waistcoated paunch and looked about with the cold little eyes that were so amazingly like the eyes of a bird. My employer, Nate Lovett, was upon his everlasting theme. “Now you just look at it. I wish the people would begin to do some thinking in this country. Why, there were six Catholics elected to this last Congress and people just sit still and say there’s no harm in a Catholic.” The horseman was a regular subscriber to a weekly paper that attributed all the ills of society to the growth in America of the Catholic faith and read it eagerly--it was the only thing he did read--that his own pet prejudice be properly fed and nourished, and no doubt there was published somewhere a paper that carried on an equally earnest campaign against the Protestants. My employer went to no church but the notion of six Catholics in the national Congress alarmed him. The horseman declared that the Catholics would in a short time come into absolute power in America and drew a black enough picture of the future when all of the things he so feared had come to pass. The wheels of the factories would stop turning, streets of towns would be unlighted, men and women would be burned at the stake, there would be no schools, no books accessible to the general public, we would have a tyrant king instead of a Congress and no man who did not bow his knee to the Pope in Rome would be safe in his bed at night. The horseman declared he had once read a book showing just the condition of affairs when the Catholics were in power--that is to say in the Middle Ages. Pointing the butt of his driving whip at Judge Turner he pleaded, and never in vain, for a more learned and scholarly substantiation of his theory. “Ain’t I right now, Judge?” he asked pleadingly. “Mind you, I ain’t setting myself up before a man who knows more than I do and has read all the books and been everywhere, even in Rome itself, but I’ll tell you something. That king, that Englishman, of the name of Henry the Eighth, who first told the Pope at Rome to go back to his Dago town and mind his own business was some man now, wasn’t he, eh?”

And now Nate had got himself warmed up and lit into his theme. “They say he was too free with women, that King Henry. Well, what if he was?” he cried. “I knew a man once, Jake Freer it was, from over near Muncie Indiana, who could get more out of a bum horse in a hard race than any man you ever set your eyes on and he was the darndest woman-chaser in ten states. Why, he couldn’t get near a skirt, old or young, without prancing around like a two-year-old stud and he was forty-five if he was a day but put him in a hard race and then you’d see the stuff come out in him. He’d be laying back in second or third place, let us say. Well, they gets to the upper turn and he knows he ain’t got the speed to outstep ’em. What does he do? Does he give up? Not he. He lets on to go crazy and begins to swear and rip around. Such language! Lord a’mighty, how he could swear! It was wonderful to hear him. He tells them other stiffs of drivers, laying in there ahead of him, that he’s going to kill ’em or punch their eyes out and the first you know he slides his old skate of a horse out in front and once in front he stays there. They don’t dast to try to pass him. He scares his own horse too I suppose but anyway he sure scares them other drivers. Down he sails to the wire looking back over his shoulder making threats and switching his long whip around. He was a big fine-looking man that had had his cheek laid open with a razor in a fight with a nigger and was an ugly looking man to see. “I’m going to whip hell outen you,” he keeps saying over his shoulder, just loud enough so the judges can’t hear him up in the stand. But them other drivers can hear him all right.

“And then what does he do? As soon as the heat is finished he hurries up to the stand, to the judges’ stand you see, pretending to be mad as a wildcat and he claims the other drivers put it up between them to foul him. That’s what he does, and he talks so hard and so earnest that he half makes the judges believe it and he gets away with maybe hitting one of the other horses in the face with his whip at the upper turn and throwing him off his stride or something like that.

“Now, Judge, I ask you, wasn’t he all right, if he was a woman-chaser? And that Henry the Eighth was just like him. He told the Pope to go hang himself and I’m an Englishman and once I told two Catholic stiffs the same thing. They banged out this here eye of mine but you bet I gave ’em what for, and that’s just what Henry did to the Pope, now ain’t it?”

At the livery barn the judge had smilingly agreed with Nate Lovett that Henry the Eighth was one of the great and noble kings of the world and had expressed unbounded admiration for Jake Freer, adding that, as far as his own reading and traveling had carried him, he had never been able to find that the Catholics when they were in absolute power all over the world had ever done anything for racing or to improve the trotting or pacing-horse breeds. “All they did,” he remarked, quietly “except perhaps Francesco Gonzago, Marquis of Mantua, who did rather go in for good horses, was to build a lot of cathedrals like Chartres, Saint Mark’s at Venice, Westminster Abbey, Mont St. Michel and others and to inspire the loveliest and truest art in the world. But,” he said smilingly, “what good does all that do for a man like you Nate, or for anyone here in this town? You didn’t know Francesco, who had a knack for fast horses, and forty cathedrals would never get you another mare for ‘Will you Please’ or help either you or Jake Freer to win one race, and there is at present little doubt in my own mind that the future of America lies largely with just such men as you and Jake.”

At his own house as we sat together in the evenings, the judge paid me the rare compliment, always deeply appreciated by a young man, of assuming I was on the same intellectual level with himself. He smoked cigarettes and drank surprising quantities of whisky, holding each glass for a moment between his eyes and the light and making a queer clicking sound with his thin dry lips as he sat looking at it.

The man talked on whatever subject came into his mind and I remember an evening when he got on the subject of women and his own attitude toward them and the queer feeling of sadness that crept over me as he talked. Much of what he had to say I did not at that time understand but I sensed the tragedy of the man’s figure as he drew for me a picture of his life.

His father had been a Presbyterian minister and a widower in the town to which the son came later to lead his own solitary life and the judge said that in his youth he remembered his father chiefly as a silent figure given to long solitary walks in fields and on country roads. “He loved my mother I fancy,” the judge said. “Perhaps he was one of those rare men who can really love.”

The boy had grown up, himself rather drawn away from the life of the town, and had been sent later to a college in the East, and during his first year in college his father died. There was a suspicion of suicide, although little was said about it, the man having taken an overdose of some sort of medicine given him by one of the town physicians.

It was then that the politician cousin appeared and after the funeral he talked to the younger man, telling him that a few days before his death the father had come to him and talked of the son, securing from the politician a promise that in case of his own sudden death, the lad would be looked after and given a fair chance in life. “Your father killed himself,” said the cousin, a rather downright fellow who was fifteen years older than the young man he addressed. “He was in love with your mother and was also a man who believed in a future life. What he did was to spend years in prayer. He was always praying, day and night as he walked around, and in the end he convinced himself that his untiring devotion had won him so high a place in God’s esteem he would be forgiven for doing away with his own life and would be admitted into Heaven to live throughout eternity with the woman he loved.”

After his father’s funeral young Turner had gone back to the eastern college and there the tragedy that had been long awaiting him suddenly pounced.

During his boyhood, he explained, he had been rather a solitary, spending his time in reading books and in playing on a piano that had belonged to his mother and that his father, who was also devoted to music, had taught him to play. “The boys of the town,” he said, in speaking of that portion of his life, “were not of my sort and I could not understand them. At school the larger boys often beat me and they encouraged the younger boys in treating me with contempt. I could not play baseball or football, physical pain of any sort made me ill, I would begin crying when anyone spoke harshly to me, and then I developed a kind of viciousness in myself too. Being unable to beat the other boys with my fists and having even at that early age read a great many books, particularly books of history, with which my father’s library were filled, I spent my days and nights dreaming of all sorts of sly deviltry.”

“For one thing,” the judge went on, laughing and rubbing his hands together, “I thought a great deal of poisoning some of the boys at the school. At the recess time we were all gathered in a large yard given over to the boys as a playground. There was the yard without any grass and at one side, by a high board fence, a long wooden shed into which we went to perform certain necessary functions of the body. The board fence separated our play place from one given over to the recreation of the girls.”

“The walls of our own shed and our side of the fence itself were covered with crude drawings and scrawled sentences expressing the sensual dreams of crude and adolescent youth and these were allowed by the authorities to remain. The place filled me with unspeakable revulsion as did also much of the talk of the boys and I shall remember always something that happened to me there. A great loutish boy is standing at the door of our shed into which I am at that moment forced by nature to go and is gazing at the sky over the high board fence that separates us from the playground of the girls. His eyes are heavy with stupid sensuality. From beyond the fence comes the shrill laughter of the little girls. Suddenly, as I am about to pass--a small creature I was then with delicate hands and at that time I believe with small delicate features--suddenly and quite without apparent cause he raises a large heavy hand and strikes me full in the face, so that the blood runs in a stream from my nose, and then, without a word to me, shrinking in terror against the fence on which the horrible pictures and words are scrawled and mingling my blood with tears, he goes calmly away. He is quite cheerful in fact, as though some deep want of his nature had suddenly been satisfied.

“I had been reading a history of Italy; a most flamboyant book it was, filled with the doings of vicious and crafty men--I now suppose they must have been, vicious and crafty but then how I delighted in them! My father’s being a minister had I presume turned my mind to the Church and how I wished he had been a great and powerful cardinal or a pope of the fifteenth century instead of what he was! I had dreamed of him as a Cosmo de Medici and myself as that Duke Francisco who succeeded Cosmo.

“What a grand time in which to live I thought that must have been and how I loved the book in my father’s library that described the life of those days. In the book were such sentences! Some of them I remember even to this day and in my bed at night, even yet sometimes, I lie laughing with delight at the thought of the fanfaronading march of the words across the pages of that book. ‘Italian vitality had subsided into the repose of the tomb. The winged arrow of death entered his heart. The hour of vengeance had struck.’

“I will read you something from the book itself,” said the judge, pouring himself another glass of whisky, holding it for a moment between his eyes and the light and then, after drinking, going to a shelf from which he took a book in a red cover. After turning the pages for a few minutes and having lighted himself a fresh cigarette he read: “‘The emperor Charles the Fifth placed Cosmo de Medici on the ducal chair of Florence and Pope Pius Fifth granted him the title of grand duke of Tuscany. He was a cruel and perfidious tyrant.’”

“‘Cosmo was succeeded by Francisco, a duke who governed through the instrumentality of the poisoned cup and the dagger, and who lapped blood with the greed of a bloodhound. He married Bianca Cabello, the daughter of a nobleman of Venice. She was the wife of a young Florentine. Francisco saw her, and, inflamed by her marvelous beauty, invited her and her husband to his palace, and assassinated her husband. His own wife died at just that time, probably by poison, and the grand duke married Bianca. His brother, the Cardinal Ferdinando, displeased with the union, presented them each with a goblet of poisoned wine, and they sank into the grave together.’”

“Aha!” cried Judge Turner, looking over the top of the book at me and laughing gleefully. “There you are, you see. That was myself in my boyhood, that young Francisco. In my fancy I succeeded, when there was no one about, when I was walking alone along the sidewalks of this very town or when I had got into my bed at night, I succeeded I say in making the great metamorphosis. In the books in my father’s library were many pictures of the streets of old Italian and Spanish cities. There was one I sharply remember. Two young bloods, with cloaks over their shoulders and with swords swinging at their sides, are approaching each other along a street. Two or three monks, a man seated on the back of a donkey going along a narrow roadway, a great stone bridge in the far distance, a bridge spanning perhaps a deep dark gulf between high mountain peaks, peaks faintly seen amid clouds and in the foreground, near the two young men and dominating the whole scene, a great cathedral done in the glorious Gothic style that I myself later, in my real flesh and blood life, so loved and bowed down before at Chartres in France.”

“And there was I, in fancy you understand, one of the two young men walking in that glorious street and not frightened little Arthur Turner, son of a sad and discouraged Presbyterian minister in an Ohio town. There was the metempsychosis. I was Francisco before he had succeeded Cosmo and had become himself the great and charmingly wicked duke sitting in his ducal chair, and long before he became enamored of the lovely Bianca. Every day I went into my own little room in my father’s house and got out a sword of wood I had fashioned from a lath and buckled it on. I had got one of my father’s coats from a closet and this, serving me as a cloak, I imagined it of the finest Florentine stuff, a cloak of such stuff as would become the shoulders of one who belonged to the great Medici family and who was to sit in the proud ducal chair of Florence. Up and down the room I went and below my father, the sad long-faced man, had become in my fancy the great Cosmo himself. We were in our ducal palace and cardinals in their red cloaks, princes, captains of armies, ambassadors and other princely personages were waiting at the door for a word with the great Cosmo.

“Welladay! My own time would come. For the present I was concerning myself with the study of poisons. On a little table in my room I had a collection of various small receptacles, an old saltcellar with a broken top, two small teacups, an empty baking-powder can and other small vessels, found in the street or stolen from our kitchen, and into these I had put salt, flour, pepper, ginger and other spices taken also by stealth from the kitchen. I mixed and remixed, making various colored powders which I folded into small packets or dampened and rolled into little balls which I concealed about my person, and then went forth into the street, to visit in fancy other palaces or to poison, or run through with my sword, people who were enemies of our house. What beautifully wicked men and women all about me and with what suavity we greeted each other! How deeply we loved and served--to the very death--our friends and how quietly crafty and urbane we were with our enemies! Oh, I loved then the word urbane. What a glorious word, I thought. At that time, as the young Francisco, I was determined that if my craftiness could raise me to the great office of pope I would take for myself the name Urbane, adding the ‘e’ to a name already taken by some of them.

“These were my dreams, and then, well I was compelled to go to the town school and sit sometimes in that horrible shed facing the crude and terrible scrawlings on the walls and to become also the victim of the crude outbreaks of my companions.

“Until one day in the spring. I had gone for a walk with my father in the late afternoon after school was dismissed and we were botanizing, as my father was fond of doing, both for his own edification and also I suppose in order to further his son’s education. In a meadow at the edge of a strip of woodland into which we were passing I found a white mushroom with which I ran to father. ‘Throw it away,’ he cried. ‘It is an Amanita Phalloides, the Destroying Angel. A bit of it no larger than a mustard seed would destroy your life.’

“We returned to our own house and sat down for the evening meal with the words ‘Amanita Phalloides’ ringing in my ears and with the round bell-like shape of the Amanita Phalloides dancing before my eyes. It was white, of a strange glowing whiteness, suggesting I thought not the death of some common man of low degree but that of a prince or a great duke. It was so Francisco and Bianca must have looked, I thought, when in the words of the flamboyant writer of the book in my father’s library, they ‘sank into the grave together.’ There must have been just that very white metallic pallor on their cheeks. What a picture of that sinking I had in my fancy. It was not just a grave, a mere dirty hole scooped out of the ground, as graves were wont to be in our Ohio town. No indeed! An opening had been made in the earth it is true but this had been entirely rimmed with flowers and was filled with a liquid, a soft purple perfumed liquid. And so into the grave went the bodies of myself as Francisco and of my lovely paramour, Bianca. The weight of our golden robes made us sink slowly into the soft purple flood and as we sank from sight music from the lips of all the fair children of the aristocracy of Florence was wafted far over fair fields, while back of the massed children in white stood also--upon a kind of green eminence at the foot of a majestic mountain--all the great lords, dukes, cardinals and other dignitaries of our imperial city.

“It was so that, as the grown-up Francisco, I was to die but I was yet alive and there was the Amanita Phalloides--later when I grew older I laughed to myself and told myself it should have been a Phallus Impudicus--there it was lying on the grass in the meadow at the edge of the wood. I had placed it carefully there at the command of my father and had, oh very carefully, marked the spot. One went along the main road leading out of town, to the south, to a certain bridge and across a meadow by a cowpath, climbed a fence, walked a certain number of steps along a rail fence beside a young wheat field, where elders grew, crossed another meadow and came to the edge of the wood. There was a stump near which grew a bush and even as I sat with father at our evening meal and as our housekeeper, a fat silent old woman with false teeth that rattled sometimes as she talked, even as she served the evening meal I was repeating to myself a certain formula I had made on our homeward journey. One hundred and nineteen steps along the cowpath in the meadow, ninety-three steps along the fence in the shadow of the elders, two hundred and six steps across the second meadow to the stump and my prize.

“I had determined to get the Amanita Phalloides on that very night after my father and our housekeeper had gone to sleep and although I was terribly frightened at the prospect of the tramp along lonely country roads and across fields, that I imagined were at night infested by strange and ferocious beasts lying in wait ready to destroy, I did not think of giving up for that reason.

“And so in fact in the middle of that very night, when all in our house and in the town were asleep, I went. Buckling on my wooden sword and creeping silently downstairs I let myself out at the kitchen door, having first supplied myself with matches and two or three bits of candle from a kitchen shelf.

“Oh, how I suffered on that journey and how determined I was! When I had got out from among the silent terrifying houses and had come nearly to the place where I was to turn off the highroad two men on horseback passed and I hid myself, lying on my belly, white and silent, in a ditch at the side of the road. ‘They are desperadoes going forth to kill,’ I told myself.

“And then they were gone and I could no longer hear the tramp of their horses and there was the trip to be made across the fields, recounting the steps as I had counted them during the homeward journey that afternoon with my father. During the walk homeward that afternoon both father and myself were muttering to ourselves, he praying no doubt that when he had taken his own life God would admit him into Heaven and into the company of the woman he loved and I counting steadily ‘eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight,’ counting steadily the steps that would lead me again to the Amanita Phalloides, to the Destroying Angel, with which I dreamed I might take many lives.

“I got my prize by the aid of the matches and the bits of candle and after a good deal of nervous fumbling about, creeping on my hands and knees in the wet grass,” said the old judge laughing in his peculiarly bitter and at the same time half-jolly way. “I got it and ran all the way home, imagining every bush and every deep shadow on the road and in the fields might contain man or beast lying in wait ready to destroy me. Then later I managed without the old housekeeper knowing to dry it on a small shelf at the back of our kitchen stove and after it was thoroughly dried I powdered it and putting the horrible powder I had concocted into papers, carried them off with me to school.”

“Many of the boys of our school lived at a distance and carried their luncheons and I fancied myself going nonchalantly into the hallway where the luncheon pails were left standing in a row and sprinkling the powders over their contents. As for the boys who went home at the noon hour--well, you see I had read in one of the books in my father’s library of a certain elegant lady of Pisa who once cut a peach, handing half of it to a gallant she wished to destroy and herself eating the other quite harmless half. I thought I might work out some such scheme, using an apple instead of a peach and working some of the poison under the skin of one side with a pin point.”

The judge had been laughing, I thought in a somewhat nervous manner, as he told me the above tale of his youth. “To be sure I never really intended to poison anyone,” he said. “Well now, did I or did I not? I really can’t say. I had achieved however, through the accidental discovery of the qualities of the Amanita Phalloides, a certain new attitude toward myself. As I went about with the little poison packets in my pockets I felt suddenly a new kind of respect for myself. I felt power in myself and something quite new to the other boys must have crept at about this time into the expression of my eyes. I was no longer frightened and did not shrink away or begin crying when one of the bullies of the school approached me at the recess time now and--could it be true?--I felt they were suddenly afraid of me. The thought filled me with a queer sort of joy and I walked boldly about the school yard, not strutting but at the same time shrinking from no one. There was at that time a report current among the boys--I do not know where it came from but it was believed and I did not deny it--that I carried a loaded pistol about in my pocket.”

The judge--and by the way his title was a quite spurious one given him by his fellow-townsmen late in his life because he had been a lawyer, because he had money, had been in the government service and had been to Europe--the judge now told me of his experience as a young man in college. Now that I come to think of it he no doubt did not tell me at one time all the things I am here setting down. During that winter and spring I spent a great many evenings in his company and he talked continuously of himself, of his cheating the men of the South to get money for himself and cousin, of his wanderings in Europe, of the men he had met at home and abroad and of what he had concluded concerning men’s lives, their motives and impulses and what he thought it would be best for me to do to make my own life as happy as possible.

He had returned at the end of his own life to live out his days alone in his native place because, as he said, one had in the end to accept his own time, place and people, whatever they might be, and that one gained nothing by wandering about the earth among strangers. During his middle years he had thought he would live out his life in some European town or city, in Chartres where, while he lived there for some months, he was all tender with love and regard for the men of a bygone age who had built the lovely cathedral at that place; at Oxford where he had spent some months wandering filled with joy among the old colleges and under the great trees that line the river Thames; in London where he got to have a great respect for the half-stupid but as he said wholly dignified self-respect of the young Englishmen he saw walking in the Strand or along Piccadilly; or in some more colorful town of the south like Madrid or Florence. The French and Paris he declared he could not understand, although he wanted very much to understand and be understood by them, as he felt they were in a way more like himself than any of the others of the Europeans he had seen. “I learned to speak their language quite fluently,” he said, “but they never really took me into their lives. The men I met, painters, writers and fellows of that sort, went about with me, borrowed my money and tried continually to sell me inferior paintings but I always realized they were laughing up their sleeves, and just what about I couldn’t make out or perhaps I shouldn’t have cared.”

In the end the judge had come home to his Ohio town and had settled down to his books, his whisky and his companionship with such men as Nate Lovett, Billy West, and the others. “We are what we are, we Americans,” he said, “and we had better stick to our knitting. Anyway,” he added, “people are nice here as far as I have been able to observe and although they are filled with stupid prejudices and are fools, the common people, workers and the like, such as the men of this town, wherever you find them, are about the nicest folk one ever finds.”

* * * * *

As for the judge’s experience as a young college man and the sort of tragedy that then came and that no doubt set the tone of his after life, it was stupid enough. With his mind filled with the thoughts taken from the books in his father’s library and after a boyhood of such loneliness and brooding as I have here described he went to college filled with high hopes but was there doomed to live as lonely an existence as he had lived in his home town. The young men of the college, given for the most part to the cultivation of athletic sports and to going about to parties and dances with the girls of a near-by city, did not take to young Turner and he did not take to them.

And then during his second year something happened. There was a young man in one of the upper classes, an athlete of note but at the same time an earnest student, toward whom the Ohio boy’s fancy now turned. It was an entirely sentimental affair, as the man afterward explained and might have done him no harm had he been content never to give it any kind of expression.

He did however near the end of his second year try to give it expression. For weeks he had been going about, much like a young girl in love, thinking constantly of the athlete, of his splendid rugged figure, fine eyes and quick active mind and of how wonderful it would be if he could have an intimate friendship with such a fellow. He dreamed of walks the two might take together in the evenings under the elms that grew on the campus. “I thought he would take my arm or I would take his and we would walk and talk,” Judge Turner said, and I remember that as he spoke he got out of his chair and walked about the room and that his small white hands played nervously over the front of his coat. He seemed not to want to face me as he told the more vital part of his tale but going behind my chair walked up and down the room at my back, and I remember how, although I was then but a boy, I knew he suffered and wanted to put his arms about me as he talked but did not dare. My own heart was filled with sadness so that unknown perhaps to him tears came in my eyes and what part of his tragedy and his words I did not understand I am sure I did dimly sense the meaning of.

He had, it happened, gone about for months thinking of the older fellow of his college as one much like himself but blessed with a stronger body, greater ability to make his way in the world and no doubt also wanting to give something of himself, or something beautiful outside himself that would represent some spirit of himself, to another man. Once young Turner went to a near-by city and spent a whole afternoon going from shop to shop trying to find some bit of jewelry, a painting or something of the sort he himself thought lovely and that would be within the limits of his own slender means that he might in secret send to the man he so admired.

“For women I did not care,” the judge said huskily. “To tell the truth I was afraid of women. In a relationship made with a woman one, I thought, risked too much. It might be quite altogether perfect or it might be just nothing at all. To tell the truth I did not then have and never have had enough assurance of fineness in myself to make it possible for me to approach a woman with the object of becoming her lover and I was not then and never have been a strong lustful man and I had, even at that time, put all thought of anything very definite ever happening between myself and a woman utterly aside.”

“I had put the thought aside, and had taken up this other, you see. Between myself and the young athlete I had created in fancy a relation that would never attempt to come to any sort of physical expression. We would live, I dreamed, each his own life, each gathering what beauty might be possible from the great outer world and bringing it as a prize to the other. There would be this man I loved and of whom I asked nothing and toward whom my whole impulse would be forever just to give and give to the very top of my bent.

“You understand how it was, or rather of course you do not understand now but some day it may be you will,” said the voice coming from the thin lips of the small fat man walking up and down the room behind me in the house in Ohio. “I did a foolish thing,” said the voice. “One day I wrote a note to the man telling something of the dream that had been in my mind and as I had nothing else to send I went to a florist’s and sent him a great bunch of beautiful roses.”

“I got no answer to the note but later he showed it about and all during the rest of my days at the school--and out of a kind of blind determination I stayed on there until I graduated and had got my degree, my expenses after my father’s death being paid by my cousin--during all the rest of my days at the school I was looked upon generally as a--perhaps you do not even know the meaning of the word--I was looked upon as a pervert.

“There was another and more vulgar word, a word I had seen on the walls of the shed and on the board fence when I was a schoolboy that was also shouted at me. Like my father before me I, in my trouble, took to walking in the streets and in lonely places at night. The word would be shouted at me from the darkness or from the steps of a house as I stumbled along in the darkness and I had not then, as I had when I was a lad, the satisfaction of thinking of myself as another Francisco, as one who could resort to poison powders to assert his own supremacy and to reëstablish himself with himself.

“I was simply determined I would finish my days in college and would not follow my father’s footsteps in taking my own life--having then and always having had a queer sort of respect, do you see, for life as it manifested itself in my own body--that I would finish my days in that place and that I would then, at the first opportunity, get hold of enough money to make myself respected among the men with whom and in whose company I would in all likelihood have to live out my days.

“I conceived, do you see, of money-making as the only sure method to win respect from the men of the modern world and as for you, my lad, if you have sensibilities as I suppose you have or I should not have taken the trouble to invite you to my house--as for you, my lad, if an opportunity comes to you, as it did to me when my cousin got me sent South, you had better take advantage of it,” said the judge, coming from behind my chair and standing before me to pour himself another glass of the whisky which he drank this time I noticed without the customary little ceremony of holding it for a moment between his eyes and the light.

I thought, or I may fancy I then thought, that the judge’s bright birdlike eyes were clouded and looked tired as he said these last words and that his hands as he poured the whisky trembled a little but perhaps the notion but springs from my more mature fancy playing over a dramatic moment in life.

And at any rate he came to loaf away the next afternoon at the stable and was as he always had been, sitting in silence, listening to the talk that went round and folding his fat little hands over his neatly-waistcoated paunch. And when he spoke he, as always, concealed under so thick a coat of good-natured toleration what sarcasm may have lurked in his words that he won and seemed always to hold the respect of all of his hearers.

NOTE III

DEFINITION

“_A really high-class horse is one that is consistent, game, intelligent, gentle, obedient, courageous, and at all times willing and able to go any route with weight up and maintain a high rate of speed and overcome all ordinary difficulties under adverse conditions._

“_Remember that horses are not machines._”

--_Trainer and Cloeker’s Handicap (strictly private)._

A NARROW beam of yellow light against the satin surface of purplish gray wood, wood become soft of texture, touched with these delicate shades of color. The light from above falls straight down the face of a great heavy beam of the wood. Or is it marble rather than wood, marble touched also by the delicate hand of time? I am perhaps dead and in my grave. No, it cannot be a grave. Would it not be wonderful if I had died and been buried in a marble sepulchre, say on the summit of a high hill above a city in which live many beautiful men and women? It is a grand notion and I entertain it for a time. What have I done to be buried so splendidly? Well, never mind that. I have always been one who wanted a great deal of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it. I am buried magnificently in a marble sepulchre cut into the side of a large hill, near the top. On a certain day my body was brought hither with great pomp. Music played, women and children wept and strong men bowed their heads. Now on feast days young men and women come up the hillside to look through a small glass opening left in the side of my burial place. It must be through the opening the yellow light comes. The young men who come up the hillside are wishing they could be like me, and the young and beautiful women are all wishing I were still alive and that I might be their lover.

How splendid! What have I done? The last thing I remember I was working at that place where so many kegs of nails had to be rolled down an incline. I was full of beer too. What happened after that? Did I save a besieged city, kill a dragon like Saint George, drive snakes out of the land like Saint Patrick, inaugurate a new and better social system, or what could I have done?

I am somewhere in a huge place. Perhaps I am standing in that great cathedral at Chartres, the cathedral that Judge Turner told me about when I was a lad and that I myself long afterward saw and that became for me as it has been for many other men and women the beauty shrine of my life. It may be that I am standing in that great place at midnight alone. It cannot be that there is any one with me for I feel very lonely. A feeling of being very small in the presence of something vast has taken possession of me. Can it be Chartres, the Virgin, the woman, God’s woman?

What am I talking about? I cannot be in the cathedral at Chartres or buried splendidly in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city. I am an American and if I am dead my spirit must now be in a large half-ruined and empty factory, a factory with cracks in the walls where the work of the builders was scamped, as nearly all building was scamped in my time.

It cannot be I am in the presence of the Virgin. Americans do not believe in either Virgins or Venuses. Americans believe in themselves. There is no need of gods now but if the need arises Americans will manufacture many millions of them, all alike. They will label them “Keep smiling” or “Safety first” and go on their way, and as for the woman, the Virgin, she is the enemy of our race. Her purpose is not our purpose. Away with her!

The beam of wood I see is just a beam of wood. It was cut in a forest and brought to the factory to support a wall that had begun to give way. No one touched it with careless hurried hands and so it aged as you see, quite beautifully--as trees themselves age. All about me are broken wheels. In the factory the great steam-driven wheels are forever still now.

Broken dreams, ends of thoughts, a stifled feeling within my chest.

Aha, you Stephenson, Franklin, Fulton, Bell, Edison--you heroes of my Industrial Age, you men who have been the gods of the men of my day--is your day over so soon? “In the end,” I am telling myself, “all of your triumphs come to the dull and meaningless absurdity, of say a clothespin factory. There have been sweeter men in old times, half forgotten now, who will be remembered after you are forgotten. The Virgin too, will be remembered after you are forgotten. Would it not be amusing if Chartres continued to stand after you are forgotten?”

Is it not absurd? Because I do not want to work in a warehouse and roll kegs, because I do not want to work in a factory anywhere I must needs go getting gaudy and magnificent and try to blow all factories away with a breath of my fancy. My fancy climbs up and up.

Democracy shall spread itself out thinner and thinner, it shall come to nothing but empty mouthings in the end. Everywhere, all over the earth, shall be the dreary commercial and material success of, say the later Byzantine Empire. In the West and after the great dukes, the kings and the popes, the commoners--who were not commoners after all but only stole the name--are having their day. The shrewd little money-getters with the cry “democracy” on their lips shall rule for a time and then the real commoners shall come--and that shall be the worst time of all. Oh, the futile little vanity of the workers who have forgotten the cunning of hands, who have long let machines take the place of the cunning of hands!

And the tired men of the arts. Oh, the cunning smart little men of the arts of New York and Chicago! Painters making advertising designs for soap, painters making portraits of bankers’ wives, story-tellers striving wearily to “make” the _Saturday Evening Post_ or to be revolutionists in the arts. Artists everywhere striving for what?

Respectability perhaps--to call attention to themselves perhaps.

They will get--a Ford. On holidays they may go see the great automobile races on the speedway at Indianapolis Indiana. Not for them the flashing thoroughbreds or the sturdy trotters and pacers. Not for them freedom, laughter. For them machines.

Long ago that Judge Turner had corrupted my mind. He played me a hell of a trick. I have been going about trying to have thoughts. What a fool I have been! I have read many books of history, many stories of men’s lives. Why did I not go to college and get a safe education? I might have worked my way through and got my mind fixed in a comfortable mold. There is no excuse for me. I shall have to pay for my lack of a proper training.

In the next room to the one in which I am lying two men are talking.

FIRST VOICE. “He took straw, ground it, put it into some kind of rubber composition. The whole was mixed up together and subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. It came out a tough kind of composition that can be made to look like wood. It can be grained like wood. He will get rich. I tell you he is one of the great minds of the age.”

SECOND VOICE. “We shall have prohibition after a while and then you’ll see how it will turn out. You can’t down the American mind. Some fellow will make a drink, a synthetic drink. It won’t cost much to make. Perhaps it can be made out of crude oil like gasoline and then the Standard will take him up. He’ll get rich. We Americans can’t be put down, I’ll tell you that.”

FIRST VOICE. “There is a man in New York makes car wheels out of paper. It is ground, I suppose, and made into a kind of mush and then is subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. The wheels look like iron.”

SECOND VOICE. “Do you suppose he paints them black like iron?”

FIRST VOICE. “It’s a great age we live in. You can’t down machinery. I read a book by Mark Twain. He knocked theories cold, I’ll tell you what. He made out all life was just a great machine.”

* * * * *

Where am I? Am I dreaming or am I awake? It seems to me that I am somewhere in a great empty place. I shall have one of my terrible fits of depression if I am not careful now. Sometimes I walk gayly along the streets and talk to men and women gayly but there are other times when I am so depressed that all the muscles of my body ache. I am like one on whose back a great beast sits. Now it seems to me I am in a huge empty place. Has the roof of a factory in which I was at work at night fallen in? There is a long shaft of yellow light falling down a beam of wood or marble.

Thoughts flitting, an effort to awaken out of dreams, voices heard, voices talking somewhere in the distance, the figures of men and women I have known flashing in and out of darkness. There is a tiny faint voice speaking: “The money-makers will grow weary and disgusted with their own money-making and labor shall have lost all faith, all sense of the cunning of the hand. The factory hands shall rule. What a mess it will be!”

* * * * *

Where am I? I am in a bed somewhere in a room in a workers’ rooming house. Two young mechanics live in the next room and now they are getting out of bed and are talking cheerfully. Once on cold nights monks awoke in cold cells in monasteries and muttered prayers to God. Now in a cold room two young mechanics proclaim their faith in new gods.

Words in a brain trying to come into consciousness out of heavy sleep. “Service! They make a point of service,” says one of the young men’s voices. My brain, a voice in my own brain, chattering: “The woman who had been taken in adultery came to wash with her hands the tired feet of the Christ. She wiped his feet with her long hair and poured precious ointment upon them.” A distorted thought born of the effort to awaken from a heavy dream: “Many men and women are going along a street. They all have long hair and bear vessels of precious ointment. They are going to wash the feet of a Rockefeller, of ‘Bet a million’ Gates, of a Henry Ford or the son of a Henry Ford, the gods of the new day.”

And now the dream again. Again the great empty place. I cannot breathe. There is a great black bell without a tongue, swinging silently in darkness. It swings and swings, making a great arch and I await silent and frightened. Now it stops and descends slowly. I am terrified. Can nothing stop the great descending iron bell? It stops and hangs for a moment and now it drops suddenly and I am a prisoner under the great iron bell.

NOTE IV

WITH a frantic effort I am awake, I am in my laborers’ rooming house and Nora, who is my friend, has been trying to clean the wall paper in my room. She takes bits of bread dough and rubs the walls. The paper on the walls was originally yellow but time and coal soot have made it almost black. Light is struggling in through a window, wiped clean by Nora but yesterday, but already nearly black again. The morning sun is playing on the wall.

Nora’s lover does not come home although he writes whenever his ship comes to port. The ship carries ore from Duluth to Chicago and one may be quite sure he does not sleep much of the time in a clean berth nor smell in his nostrils the clean sea air, as I represented things to Nora when I wanted her to take better care of my room. Nora has tried. That idea of mine was a purely literary one but it has made Nora and myself friends.