“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.”
NOTE X
BERNERS, the merchant and horseman, had for a good many years been disappointed and hurt by the thought that his family was not to carry on after his death but in his old age had grown cheerful about the matter. “We aren’t so much. It doesn’t matter. I dare say the sun will come up mornings and the moon at night when there are no more Berners in Illinois, or anywhere else, for that matter.” As a child the boy Alonzo was always sickly. “We’ve always been thinking he’d die, about twice every year, but you see he hasn’t quite done it yet,” the old man said softly.
Hallie, the daughter of the house, was five years older than her brother and was devoted to him. After seeing them together one understood that she could never have married. It was just a thing that couldn’t have happened. One thought of her as saying to herself: “Marriage is too intimate. I am not made for intimate relations.” The idea of Hallie Berners held in a man’s arms was for some obscure reason monstrous and yet how affectionate she was! There was a sense in which her brother and father were babes in her charge, babes never touched by her hands or her lips but constantly caressed by her thoughts. She was a tall rather stern-looking woman with graying hair, large strong hands and quiet gray eyes and she was very shy. Her shyness expressed itself in severity and when she was much touched she grew silent and almost haughty in her bearing. It was as though she were saying to herself: “Look out now! If you are not careful you will let something precious escape you.”
The son Alonzo was a man of thirty-five with a little black mustache, thin features, small delicate hands and thick, black hair. As a young man he had gone away to an eastern college but a desperate illness had compelled him to come home almost at once and he had not again tried getting out from under his sister’s care, only leaving the family roof when he crept away for the brief periods of drunkenness that gave him a temporary means of escape out of his house of pain. He stayed at home and on fair days sometimes rode about town and the surrounding country behind an old black horse that belonged to the family or sat in the garden under the apple trees talking with friends who came to see him. In a large room in the house where he stayed on dull or cold days there were a couch, a fireplace and many books on shelves built into the walls.