What a center of influence and power was that half-mile track and the stables about it. It was a primary school of crime, with its museum of blasphemy and its department of slang and lewdness. What a place for the tender soul of youth!
There were the sleek trotters passing in and out, booted for their work. In the sulkies behind them were those cursing, kinglike, contemptuous jockeys, so sublime and exalted that they were even beyond the reach of our envy. There were the great prancing, beautiful stallions, and the swipes—heroic, foul-mouthed, proud, free, and some of them dog-faced. Scarred, sniffing bulldogs were among them, spaniels with grace locks on their brows, sleek little fox terriers, and now and then a roaring mastiff. How we envied them! We became their willing slaves, we boys of the school, fetching water and sweeping floors for the sacred privilege of rubbing a horse's leg. In the end some had been kicked out of the stables, but they did not mind that. What was that if they could only play swipes and rub a horse's leg? It only heightened their respect and their will to return.
As my life went on I saw how these leading lights of Griggsby shone, like stars, above the paths of the young who were choosing their way.
We boys began to think that greatness was like a tree, with its top in the brain and its roots in the human stomach, and that the latter needed much irrigation. It seemed to us that poker, inebriety, slangy wit, and the lavish hand were as the foliage of the tree; that fame, wealth, and honor were its fruit; that the goat, the trot-ting-horse, and the millinery store were as birds of the air that sometimes lit in its branches.
We boys were wont to gather in an abandoned mill near the Smead house, on the river bank, after school, for practice in chewing and expectoration, and to discuss the affairs of the village.
One day Henry Dunbar and Ralph Buckstone had a little flask of whisky, which they had stolen from the coat pocket of old Thurst Giles as he lay drunk in the lumber yard. Henry held it up and gave us an able imitation of John Griggs in the bar-room of the Palace Hotel, through the open door of which we boys had witnessed bloody and amusing episodes.
“Gentlemen, here's to the juice of the corn,” he began, in the swelling tone of Griggs. “The inspiration of poetry, the handmaid of eloquence, the enemy of sorrow, the friend of genius, the provoker of truth.”
It was rather convincing to the youthful mind, coming as it did from the lips of the great Griggs. We wondered how it was that old Thurst Giles and Billy Suds, and other town drunkards, had failed to achieve greatness. They were always soaked; Ralph said that the juice did not have a fair chance in such men, that they were too poor and scrawny, and their stomachs too small. They lacked capacity. It was like putting seed in thin soil. Everybody knew that John Griggs could drink a whole big bottle and walk off as if nothing had happened.
Henry Dunbar said that a man had to have money and clothes and a good voice, and especially a high hat, as well as whisky and cigars, to amount to anything.
Tommy West thought that the failure of Thurst and Billy was due to the fact that they were dirty and mean, and could not make a speech. In his view, also, they didn't shave often enough. If a man used whisky just for the sake of keeping up appearances, it was all right; but if he used it to get drunk with, it made him just naturally comical.