NOTE IX
ON a certain Sunday morning of that summer I found myself sitting in a little garden under apple trees back of a red brick house that had green window blinds and that stood on the side of a hill near the edge of an Illinois town of some five or six thousand people. Sitting by a small table near me was a dark slender man with pale cheeks, a man I had never seen until late on the evening before and who I had half thought would die but a few hours earlier. Now, although the morning was warm, he had a blanket wrapped around him and his thin hands, lying on the table, trembled. Together we were drinking our morning coffee, containing a touch of brandy. A robin hopped on the grass near by and the sunlight falling through the branches of the trees made yellow patches at our feet.
I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of the circumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. The garden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through the centre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowers about the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence were tall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees and near by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the garden one got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the elders there was a road that led along a hillside down into town.
The town itself was old, for that Illinois country, and had already had two lives. First, it had been a river town on the banks of a stream that led down into the Mississippi, and now it was a merchandising centre. Later perhaps it would become a factory town. The river life had died, when the railroads came but there still were some remnants of the older place, one or two streets of small log stores and houses standing on a bluff above the river and now used as residences by farm laborers. The old town, left thus off by itself half forgotten by the new town, was picturesque. In the company of my strange new acquaintance and once with his father, an old man who had lived in the river town in the days of its prosperity, I later spent several hours among the old houses. Dogs and pigs wandered through the deep dust of the principal street facing the river or slept in the shade of the old buildings and the old man told me that even in its better days it was a quite terrible place. In the winter, in the early days, the roads were hub deep to the wagons with mud, the houses were small and near each house was an outhouse that smelled horribly in summer and invited millions of flies. Pigs, cows and horses were kept in little sheds near the houses and often diseases, encouraged by the utter lack of sanitation, swept through the town and sometimes carried off whole families.
The older of the two men, named Jim Berners, was a merchant, owning with his son a large store on the principal street of the newer town and had been brought to the Illinois town when he was a child. His father, an Englishman, had come to America as a young man and for several years had been a merchant in the city of Philadelphia. Having married there and wanting to establish himself as the head of a landed family in the new country he had come to Illinois when land could be had at a low price and had bought five hundred acres of river bottom land.
With his young wife and his three children he lived in the river town and had cleared and got ready for planting most of his land when misfortune came down upon him. In the crude little towns of that day doctors were for the most part half educated, the houses were stuffy and full of drafts in winter and epidemics of smallpox, followed by scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhus came and could not be checked. Within two years the merchant’s rather delicate wife died and her death was followed by his own and by the death of two of his three children. There was only the babe left alive and he had been put in charge of an old judge with whom the father had formed a friendship.
The young Berners had grown into manhood in the household of the judge, whose great boast it was that he was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. He told me he had never been ill a day in his life. Upon reaching manhood he sold three hundred acres of his land and like his father became a merchant.
Father and son still owned the Berners merchandising establishment although they seemed to give it little attention.
What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintance the younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he had got quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain. The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attempt to free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After the drunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and then there came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tense nerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent the days talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town in a buggy.
On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year at regular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away without warning to his father or to an older sister of the household, young Alonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-sea sailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer but had tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had also gone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whose hands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached to the Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first as clerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavily built man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidently from an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddling gait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying to make its way rapidly along on land.
In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agricultural implements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand other things and there was also a harness shop in the main building facing the town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings in which were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins of corn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.
The whole establishment, an infinitely busy place, was run by the sailor who could neither read or write but who was helped by a stern-looking woman bookkeeper. The sailor was shrewd wise and jolly and had always some tale of life on the deep sea to tell to his farmer customers. He was the most popular man in town and there was another feature that added tremendously to the popularity of the store. In the spring, just before planting time, and in the fall after the crops were harvested, the Berners gave a great feast in one of the sheds. The hay corn and lumber were taken out and long wooden tables erected, while invitations were sent far and wide to the town and country people. Women of the town and country wives came to help prepare the feast, the old sailor waddled about shouting, pigs, turkeys, calves and lambs were killed, bushels of potatoes baked, pies and cakes, baked in advance by the women, were brought and there was a feast lasting sometimes all afternoon and far into the night. Alonzo Berners had provided many barrels of beer and the sailor and his pals among the farmers got half drunk and sang songs and made speeches while the professional men of the town, the lawyers, judges and doctors, all came and made speeches. What a storm of talk! Even the preachers and the rival merchants were there and a prayer was said as each new group sat down to the feast, the ministers shaking their heads over the beer drinking but falling to with a will at the food. The two annual affairs must often have cost the Berners a good part of the profits made during the year but they did not mind. “It doesn’t matter,” said the elder Berners. “I’m old and nearly ready to die, it isn’t likely Alonzo will live very long and as for Hallie,” meaning the daughter, “I have already given her one of my two farms. The Berners are going to peter out anyway and why should they care about leaving money behind them?”
The elder Berners, a man of seventy, rarely went into town but spent most of his days in his little garden and during my own visit at the house he came every day to sit with me, smoking his pipe and talking until he fell asleep in his chair. When he had been a younger man and before his wife died he had owned several trotting horses of which he loved to talk. One of the horses, named “Peter Point,” had been the pride and joy of his life and he spoke of the horse as of a beloved son.
Oh, what a great magnificent beast the stallion Peter Point had been and how he could trot! Sometimes when he spoke of him the old man jumped to his feet and climbing on the chair seat touched the limb of an apple tree with his fingers. “Looket here now. He was taller than that. Yes, siree! He was taller than that when he threw up his head,” he declared, jumping down from the chair and hopping about like an excited boy and walking up and down before me rubbing his hands together. He told me a long tale of a trip he had once taken with his stallion and two trotting mares as far east as Pennsylvania and of how Peter Point won every race in which he started, always the trotting free-for-all, and spoke fervently of the moment when he came out with the others and paraded before the grandstand before the first heat of a race. Jim Berners, then young and strong, sat in the sulky and what a moment it was for him. The memory of it filled him with excitement. “My father used to talk of the English aristocracy to his friend the judge, with whom I was left when all my family died, and the judge told me tales of what he had to say. Sometimes on days like that, when we came out for the first heat and were scoring down for the start or going slowly back for another try after a false start, I used to think of his words. There was me, sitting in the sulky, and there was the man, old Charlie Whaley, who took care of Peter Point, standing over near the grandstand with a blanket over his shoulder. Charlie winked and nodded at me and I winked at him. How swelled up with pride I was. I usually had two or three hundred dollars bet on Peter’s chances and he never once went back on me. I thought we were pretty aristocratic ourselves, Peter and me.”
“Well, and so there we were jogging slowly up to the starting place and the people in the grandstand were shouting and down in the betting ring there was a hubbub and I used to look at the people and think about them and about myself and the horse too. ‘Lordy,’ I used to say to myself, ‘what a lot we do think of ourselves and what God-awful things we are, we humans, come right down to it.’ I was raised in the old Judge Willard’s house, right here in this town, you know, and in the old days a lot of what we called our big men used to come to talk their affairs over with the judge. Abe Lincoln used to come and once the editor of the Chicago Tribune and young Logan who afterward got to be governor, and a lot of others, congressmen, and other such truck. They came and planned and schemed and then they used to make speeches up in front of the town hall that was down by the river in the old town but that later burned to the ground. They talked and talked, and I used to listen.
“And such talk! ‘All men are created free and equal,’ ‘Nature’s noblemen,’ ‘Noble pioneers’ and all that kind of stuff about men just like me. Lordy, what a lot of big sounding words I had listened to when I was a kid. It used to make me sick to think of it sometimes later, when I was sitting up there behind Peter and to think that I had sometimes believed such bunk myself, I who had seen and known a lot of them same pioneers pretty intimately and should have known better than to listen.
“As I say, I used to think about it and a lot of other foolishness I’d heard, when I was up behind Peter, and he with his head up so high and looking—say, he could walk past one of them grandstands and past all of them people like God Almighty himself might have walked! What I mean is, not giving the people or the other horses in the race or the other drivers or the judges up in the stand or me or anyone anything but his darned contempt. It was lovely to see. Sometimes when he’d see a mare he’d throw up his head and snort and sometimes there was a little quiet noise he made just as though he was saying to us ‘You worms, you worms,’ to all of us, all of the people in the world including myself.
“Why, hell, no one ever knew how fast that Peter could trot. He got sick and died before he ever got to the grand circuit where horses of his own class usually raced,” the old man declared proudly. Jim Berners had taken his horses over into Ohio and with Peter had won a race at a place called Fostoria and then that night the horse was taken violently ill and lying down in his stall quietly died.
His owner had been in at the death and after the stallion was dead had walked about the dark race course the rest of the night and had decided to give up racing. “I took a turn about the track,” he said, “and stood a long time at the head of the stretch thinking of the times I had made the turn up there, with Peter leading all the other horses, and not half extending himself at that, and of how proud I had been so many times, sitting behind him and pretending to myself I was doing the job. I wasn’t doing a darned thing but sitting still and riding home in front. It was only after Peter died I ever told myself the truth.”
“I stood up at the head of the stretch, as I said, and the moon came out and Peter was dead now and I decided to go home. And I had some thoughts that night about most human beings, including myself, that I haven’t ever forgot. I thought a lot of us were swine and the rest a kind of half-baked lot, put us against a horse like Peter had been. ‘And so,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll quit racing and go home and try to keep my mouth shut a good deal of the time.’ And I haven’t been too much stuck on myself or anyone else ever since.”