You and I would walk a little way, in the forest, or on a prairie, or on the streets of a town, and then we would stop. We would be the only moving things in the world and then one of us would start a thought rolling and rolling, down time, down space, down mind, down life too.
I am sure I would let you do it if later you would keep all of the voices of your mind hushed while I did it in my turn. I would wait ten lives while others did it for my turn.
* * * * *
That impulse gone long since as I sat that day before the cathedral of Chartres! It was an impulse that had come time and again to every artist but my own moments had come often enough. I had no cause to quarrel with my own life.
Such moments as I had already had in it. “Life owes me nothing,” I kept saying over and over to myself. It was true enough. For all one might say about American life it had been good to me. On that afternoon I thought that if I were suddenly to be confronted with death in the form of the old man with a sickle in his hand, I would be compelled to say, “Well, it’s your turn now, old fellow. I’ve had my chance. If I had done little enough, it’s my fault, not yours.”
At any rate life in America had poured itself out richly enough. It was doing that still. As I sat on the bench before Chartres on that gray day I remembered such moments.
* * * * *
A hot afternoon at Saratoga. I had gone to the races with two men from Kentucky, one a professional gambler and the other a business man who could never succeed because he was always running off to the horse races or some such place with such no-accounts as the little gambler and myself. We were smoking big black cigars and all of us were clad in rather garish clothes. All about us were men just like us but with big diamonds on their fingers or in their neckties. On a stretch of green lawn beneath trees a horse was being saddled. Such a beauty! What a buzz of colorful words! The professional gambler, a small man with crooked legs, had once been a jockey and later a trainer of race horses. It was said he had done something crooked, had got himself into disgrace with other horsemen but of that I knew little. At the sight of such a horse as we were now watching as the saddle was put on something strange happened to him. A soft light came into his eyes. The devil! I had once or twice seen just such a light in the eyes of painters at work, I had seen such a light in the eyes of Alfred Stieglitz in the presence of a painting. Well, it was such a light as might have come into the eyes of a Stark Young holding in his hands some piece of old Italian craftsmanship.
I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse I spoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that painting of Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.
The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like to hang around race tracks at night myself.”