BOOK TWO

NOTE I

I WAS rolling kegs of nails out of a great sheet-iron warehouse and onto a long platform, from where they were to be carted by trucks, down a short street, out to a wharf and aboard a ship. The kegs were heavy but they were not large, and as they were rolled down a slight incline to the platform the rolling could be done with the foot. Like practically all modern workmen my body had plenty to do but my mind was idle. There was no planning of the work, no scheming to make the day’s work fit the plan. The truckmen, four heavy and good-natured Swedes, loaded the trucks, and that also required no skill. The kegs were so heavy that a few of them only could be put on a truck at one time and the trucks did not have to be loaded skillfully.

As for the nails themselves, they came pouring out of machines somewhere back in the factory at the edge of which the warehouse stood.

The warehouse had two platforms, one at which cars were loaded and our own for the loading of trucks, and I could hear voices on the other platform—an oath, a broken laugh—but never did I see the men employed there.

On our side we had a little life of our own. My single fellow-workman, who all day long ran in and out of the warehouse with me, was a short, stocky young man who on Saturday afternoons played baseball and, in the winter, hockey. He continually boasted of his prowess in games and when the warehouse foreman was not about—he seldom appeared on our platform—the athlete stopped work to tell one of the teamsters a story.

The stories all concerned one impulse in life, and as I had grown unspeakably weary of hearing them and indeed doubted the man’s potency, he was so insistent about it, I did not stop working but rolled kegs busily. The teamster laughed heavily. “There was a fat woman, hanging out clothes, on a line. Two stray dogs came along,” etc. The story-teller himself laughed as he told his tale and sometimes glared at me because I did not stop to listen. “You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” he asked, but I did not answer. The horses hitched to the trucks were quiet beasts with broad flanks, and as he talked, telling his tales, they switched their tails slowly back and forth, driving flies away. Then they turned their heads to look at me, running out of the warehouse and down the incline behind one of the flying kegs. “Don’t be in a hurry. You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” they also seemed to be saying.

My legs and arms, my body had enough to do but my mind was idle. During the year before I had been with race horses, going with them about Ohio to the fairs and race meetings, and then I had given up that life, although I loved it well, because I wanted something from men I did not think I could find at the tracks. The life of the sporting fraternity had color and the horses themselves, beautiful temperamental things, fascinated me, but I hungered for something of my own. At the tracks one received a succession of thrills and was kept on the alert but the emotions aroused were all vicarious.

“No Wonder,” a gray pacer, was on the track for his morning workout and I, being unoccupied at the moment, leaned over a wooden fence to watch. He had been jogged slowly around the track and now his driver was about to do what we called “setting him down.” His flanks flattened and he seemed to spring into his stride, and what a stride it was! He fairly flew over the ground and the boy by the fence, half asleep but a moment before, was now all attention. He leaned far over the fence to watch and wait. Now the gray was making the upper turn and soon he would be headed directly down the home stretch. By leaning far forward the boy could see just the play of the muscles over the powerful breast. Oh, the flying legs, the distended nostrils, the sobbing whistle of the wind in and out of the great lungs!

But all vicarious after all, all something outside myself. I rubbed the legs of the horses and later walked them slowly for miles, cooling them out after a race or after a workout. Plenty of time to think. Could I, in time, become a Geers, a Snapper Garrison, a Bradley, a Walter Cox, a Murphy? Something whispered to me that I could not. There was required of a successful horseman something I did not have. Either the trotting or the running tracks required a calm, a seemingly indifferent exterior I could not achieve. A track negro with whom I worked had spoken discouraging words. “You’re too excitable, too flighty,” he said. “A horse, that wanted to, would know how to bluff you. You ain’t made to get all they is outen a horse.”

Restlessness had taken hold of me and I had left the tracks to go visit certain cities.

The work, I found, did not tire me and after the longest and hardest day I went to my room, bathed, took off my sweaty clothes and was a new man, quite refreshed and ready for adventure.

At the warehouse a kind of understanding between myself and the Swedish teamsters, had already been achieved. When they returned with the empty trucks along the short street between our warehouse and the wharf they stopped at a saloon to have filled the tin pails for beer they carried on the trucks, and the athlete and myself had also provided ourselves with pails which they had filled for us. Aha! the athlete might boast of his prowess on the baseball field or at playing hockey in the winter, but I could outdrink him and in the eyes of the teamsters that made me the better man. How foolish the athlete! Had he declined to have anything to do with drink all might have been well with him, but as the ability to “carry your liquor” was an accepted standard among us he foolishly accepted it. On hot days and in the late afternoon the pails were sent frequently to the saloon and the athlete became worried. “Ah, let’s cut it out,” he said to me coaxingly and the teamsters laughed. “Why, Eddie, we haven’t had any at all yet,” they said; but he insisted, was compelled to insist. Already he staggered a little as he rolled the kegs out of the warehouse and now it was my turn to loiter with the teamsters while he worked. No more story-telling now. “I have a kind of headache to-day,” he said, while the teamsters and I drank six, eight, sometimes ten or twelve of the generous portions of strong beer, flauntingly. As the beer was paid for from a fund collected from all, we were drinking, in part at least, at the athlete’s expense. I drank and drank, enjoying the discomfiture of my fellow-worker, and something happened inside my head. My legs remained steady and I could roll the kegs more rapidly and accurately than ever—they became like corks and I fairly whirled them along the warehouse floor and down the incline and to the trucks—but at the same time all reality became strangely colored and overlaid with unreality inside myself. Beyond the roadway, in which the trucks stood, there was a vacant lot and this now became the centre of my attention. The vacant lot was in reality filled with rubbish, rusty tin cans, piles of dirt, broken wagon wheels and wornout household utensils, and among all this foul stuff dirty-faced children played and screamed; but now all this unsightliness was wiped off the surface of my vision. I talked to the teamsters and together we laughed at Eddie who kept scolding and saying apologetically that the beer we had been drinking was rotten stuff and gave him a headache, while all the time the most marvelous things took place in the vacant lot before my eyes.

First of all an army of soldiers appeared and marched back and forth directed by a man on a magnificent horse. He was many years older but at the same time looked strangely like myself and wore a long, flowing purple mantle. And also he had a golden helmet on his head while his soldiers, who obeyed his slightest wish, were also richly dressed. First there came a file of men dressed in light green and with bright yellow plumes flying from their helmets, and these were followed by others dressed in blue, in flaming red and in uniforms combining all these colors.

The men marched for what seemed a long time in the vacant lot while I dreamed of becoming a great general, a world conqueror perhaps, but continued meanwhile sending the kegs whirling down the incline. Eddie and I had a race to see who could roll kegs most accurately and rapidly—an hour before he could have beaten me easily, but now I could roll six to his five and land them just so, standing upright on the platform below—while at the same time there was this other life, outside myself, going on before my eyes.

I raised my eyes and looked at the vacant lot and the soldiers went through quick and accurate manœuvres. Then they marched away along a near-by street and the place became a great canvas over which colors played. The surface was brown, a soft velvety glowing brown, now other colors appeared, reds, golden yellows, deep purples. The colors stole swiftly out across the open place and designs were formed. I will be a great painter, I decided; but now the vacant lot had become a carpet on which walked beautiful men and women. They smiled at me, beckoned to me, and then they paid me no more attention and became absorbed in each other. “Very well; if you prefer to roll kegs, go your own way,” they seemed to be saying, and when they laughed there was something derisive in their laughter.

Was I a little insane? Had I been born a little insane? I rolled the kegs of nails, drank innumerable pails of beer, the sweat rolled from my body and soaked my clothes and presently quitting time came and I returned along a street with hundreds of other workers—all smelling equally vile—to a rooming house where I lived with many other laborers, Hungarians, Swedes, a few Irish, several Italians and, oddly enough, one English Jew.

The house was run by a worried-looking woman of forty who had one daughter, a young woman of nineteen, who had taken a kind of fancy to me. Her father, a laborer like myself, had deserted her mother when the child was but four or five years old and had never been seen again. As for the daughter, she had a strong body, clear blue eyes, thick lips and a large nose, and like myself she had Italian blood in her veins, her father having been an Italian.

Toward her mother she was loyal, staying in the house and doing the work of a chambermaid for very little pay when she might have made a great deal more money at something else; but her loyalty was tempered by a sturdy kind of independence that nothing could shake. During the spring, before I came to live at the house, she had become engaged to marry a young sailor, an engineer’s assistant on a lake boat, but, although later I spoke to her of the danger, she did not let the fact of her engagement to another interfere with her relationship with me.

Our own relationship is a little hard to explain. When I came from the warehouse and climbed the stairs to my room I found her there at work, making my bed, which had been allowed to air all day, or changing the sheets. The sheets were changed almost daily and her mother constantly scolded about the matter. “If he wants clean sheets every day let him pay for them,” the mother said, but the daughter paid no attention, and indeed I was no doubt responsible for more than one quarrel between mother and daughter. Among laboring people a girl engaged is taboo and the other men in the house thought I was doing an unfair thing to her absent lover. Whether or not he knew what was going on I never found out.

What was going on? I came into the house, climbed the stairs and found her at work in my room. At the foot of the stairs I had met her mother, who had scowled at me, and now the other workers, trooping in, attempted to tease. She kept on working and did not look at me and I went to stand by a window that looked down into the street. “Which one is she going to marry?—that’s what I want to know,” one of the workers on the floor below called to another. She looked up at me and something I saw in her eyes made me bold. “Don’t mind them,” I said. “What makes you think I do?” she replied. I was glad none of the men who worked at our warehouse roomed at the house. “They would be shouting, laughing and going on about it all day,” I thought.

The young woman—her name was Nora—talked to me in whispers as she did the work in the room, or she listened and I talked. The minutes passed and we stayed on together, looking at each other, whispering, laughing at each other. In the house all, including the mother, were convinced I was working to bring about Nora’s ruin and the mother wanted to order me out of the house but did not dare. Once as I stood in the hallway outside my door late at night I had overheard the two women talking in the kitchen of the house. “If you mention the matter again I shall walk out of the house and never come back.”

Occasionally in the evening Nora and I walked along the street, past the warehouse where I was employed, and out upon the docks, where we sat together looking into the darkness and once—but I will not tell you what happened upon that occasion.

First of all I will tell you of how the relationship of Nora and myself began. It may be that the bond between us was brought into existence by the beer I drank at the warehouse in the late afternoons. One evening, when I had first come to the house, I came home, after drinking heavily, and it was then Nora and I had our first intimate conversation.

I had come into the house and climbed the three flights of stairs to my room, thinking of the vacant lot covered with the soft glowing carpet and of the beautiful men and women walking thereon, and when I got to my room it seemed unspeakably shabby. No doubt I was drunk. In any event there was Nora at work and it was my opportunity. For what? I did not quite know, but there was something I knew I wanted from Nora and the beer drinking had made me bold. I had a sudden conviction that my boldness would overawe her.

And there was something else too. Although I was but a young man I had already worked in factories in several cities and had lived in too many shabby rooms in shabby houses in factory streets. The outer surface of my life was too violently uncouth, too persistently uncouth. Well enough for Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and others to sing of the strength and fineness of laboring men, making heroes of them, but already the democratic dream had faded and laborers were not my heroes. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all. They were so likely to be dry intellectual sterile men. Already I had begun asking myself the questions I have been asking myself ever since. “Does no man love another man? Why does not some man arise who wants the man working next to him to work in the midst of order? Can a man and a woman love each other when they live in an ugly house in an ugly street? Why do working men and women so often seem perversely unclean and disorderly in their houses? Why do not factory owners realize that, although they build large, well-lighted factories, they will accomplish nothing until they realize the need of order and cleanliness in thinking and feeling also?” I had come into the midst of men with a clean strong body, my mother had been one who would have fought to the death for order and cleanliness about her and her sons. Was it not apparent that something had already happened to the democracy on which Whitman had counted so much? (I had not heard of Whitman then. My thoughts were my own. Perhaps I had better be more simple in speaking of them.)

I had come out of a messy workplace along a messy street to a messy room and did not like it and within me was the beer that made me bold.

And there were the visions I had seen in the vacant lot. It may be that I thought then that all my fellows lived as I did, having quite conscious and separate inner and outer lives going on in the same body that they were trying to bring into accord. As for myself I saw visions, had from boyhood been seeing visions. Moments of extreme exaltation were followed by times of terrible depression. Were all people really like that? The visions were sometimes stronger than the reality of life about me. Might it not be that they were the reality, that they existed rather than myself—that is to say, rather than my physical self and the physical fact of the men and women among whom I then worked and lived, rather than the physical fact of the ugly rooms in ugly houses in ugly streets?

Was there a consciousness of something wrong, a consciousness we all had and were ashamed of?

There was the vacant lot in which an hour before I had seen the marching soldiers and the beautifully gowned men and women walking about. Why might that not exist as really as the half-drunken teamsters, myself, the irritated athlete and the piles of unsightly rubbish?

Perhaps it did exist in all of us. Perhaps the others saw what I saw. At that time I had a great deal of faith in a belief of my own that there existed a kind of secret and well-nigh universal conspiracy to insist on ugliness. “It’s just a kind of boyish trick we’re up to, myself and the others,” I sometimes told myself, and there were times when I became almost convinced that if I just went suddenly up behind any man or any woman and said “boo” he or she would come out of it and I would come out of it, and we would march off arm in arm laughing at ourselves and everyone else and having really quite a wonderful time.

I had decided to try to say “boo” to Nora, I fancy. There I was in the room with her (I had been in the house about three days and had only seen her and heard her name spoken once before, when she was sweeping out the hallway by my door), and now she was throwing the covers back over the soiled sheets on my bed and there was dust on the window panes and streaks along the wall paper, while the floor of the room had been given but two or three careless whisks with a broom. Nora was making the bed and back of her head, as she leaned over to do the job, there was a picture on the wall, a picture of five or six water lilies lying on a table. There was a streak of dust down across the white face of the lilies and at that moment a cloud of dust, stirred up by the heavy trucks now going homeward along the street, floated just outside the window.

“Well, Miss Nora,” I suddenly said after I had been standing in the room for a moment, silently and boldly staring at her. I began advancing toward her and no doubt my eyes were shining with enthusiasm. I dare say I was pretty drunk but I am sure I walked steadily. “Well,” I cried in a loud voice, “what are you up to there?”

She turned to stare at me and I went on, still speaking rapidly, with a kind of hurried nervous stuttering manner brought on by the liquor and a fear that if I stopped speaking I should not be able to start again. “I refer to the bed,” I said, going up close to her and pointing at it. “You see, don’t you, that the sheets you are putting on the bed are soiled?” I pounded on my own chest, much in the manner of the primitive hero in Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape”; and no doubt had I at that time seen the play I might at that moment have begun saying in hoarse, throaty tones: “I belong. I belong.”

I did not say anything of the sort because I am not primitive and had not then seen the play, nor did I whine or complain because of the soiled sheets on the bed. I talked, I am afraid, rather like a Napoleon or a Tamerlane to poor Nora who was already appalled by my sudden descent upon her.

Pounding on my chest and descending upon her I made a speech something in the following manner: “My dear Nora, you are a woman and no doubt a virgin, but you may not always be one. Have hopes. Some day a man will come along who will admire your person and will ask your hand in marriage.” I looked at her somewhat critically. “You will not refuse him,” I declared, with the air of a soothsayer delivering himself of a prophecy. “You will accept the marriage state, Nora, partly because you are bored, partly because you will look upon the opportunity as a means of escape from your present way of life, and partly because you will find within yourself an instinct telling you that any kind of marriage will bring you something you want.”

“But we will not discuss you. We will discuss myself,” I declared. I continued pounding myself on the chest and so great was my momentary enthusiasm that later my breast was somewhat sore. “Nora, woman,” I said, “look at me! You cannot see my body and I dare say if I did not have on these soiled clothes your maidenly modesty would compel you to run out of this room. But do not run. I do not intend to take off my clothes.”

“Very well, we will not speak any more of my body,” I said in a loud voice, wishing to reassure her since I could see she was becoming a little alarmed. No doubt she thought me insane. She had grown slightly pale and had stepped away from me so that her back was against the wall and the soiled water lilies were just above her head. “I am not speaking of my own body in relation to your body, do not get that entirely feminine notion into your head,” I explained. “I am speaking of my body in relation to yonder soiled sheets.”

And now I pointed toward the bed and stopped pounding my own chest which was becoming sore. Stepping quite close to her, so close in fact that my face was within a few inches of her own, I put one hand against the wall and tried to quiet my own loud, blustering tones, and to assume a tone of great ease, or rather, of nonchalance. I took a cigarette from my pocket and succeeded in lighting it without burning my fingers, a feat requiring a good deal of concentration under the circumstances. The truth is, that I had bethought myself that in a moment more Nora would either hit me with the broom, that stood close at her hand, or would run out of the room thinking me insane.

As I had a notion I wanted to put over to her while I could and while my beer-born courage lasted I now tried to be more at my ease. A little smile began to play about the corners of my mouth and I thought of myself at the moment as a diplomat—not an American or an English diplomat, let me say, but an Italian diplomat of, we will suppose, the sixteenth century.

In as light and bantering a tone as I could assume under the circumstances—my task was the more difficult because a workman, hearing my speech from a neighboring room, had come along the hallway and was now standing at the door with a look of astonishment on his face—assuming, I say, a light bantering tone, I now rapidly explained to Nora the notion that had been in my head when I interrupted her bed-making. She had been about to reach for the broom and with it to drive me from the room, but now the words streaming from my lips caught and held her attention. With a fluency in words that never comes to me when I am writing and that only comes to my lips when I am slightly under the influence of strong drink I explained myself. To the astonished young woman I compared the bed she had been making to a suit of clothes I might be about to put on my body after I had bathed the aforesaid body. Talking rapidly and enunciating my words very distinctly so she should lose nothing of my discourse (and I might here explain to you, my readers, that in ordinary conversation I am rather given to the slovenly dragging of words so common to the people of the Middle West. We, you must know, do not say “feah,” as a New Englander might, nor “fear,” as an Italian-American might, that is to say, pronouncing distinctly the “r,” but “feehr”), going on very clearly and distinctly I told Nora she was not to judge me by the smell that came from my clothes, that under my clothes lived a body I was about to wash clean as soon as she had finished her work in the room and had gone away. Leaving both her and the workman outside the door standing and staring at me I walked to the window and threw it up. “The cloud of dust you see floating up from the street below,” I explained, “does not represent all the elements of the atmosphere even in an American industrial city.” I then tried, as best I could, to explain to my limited audience that air, normally, might be a clean thing to be cleanly breathed into the lungs and that a man like myself, although he might wear dirty, soiled clothes in order to earn money to keep his body alive might also at the same time have a certain feeling of pride and joy in his body and want clean sheets to put it between when he laid it down to sleep at night.

To Nora, standing there and staring at me, half in wonder, half in anger, I tried to explain a little my habit of having visions and sketched for her, as rapidly and briefly as I could, the marvelous sights I had in fancy seen in the vacant lot near the warehouse in the late afternoon, and also I preached her a kind of sermon, not, I assure you, with the object of changing her own character but rather to carry out the plan that had formed in my rather befuddled brain, a plan for bullying her—that is to say of bending her to my own purpose if possible.

Being by nature a rather shrewd man, however, I did not put the case to her directly but pursuing the method common to preachers who always try to conceal their own wants under the mask of the common good, so that a man who is apparently always trying to get others into Heaven is really only afraid he will not manage to get there himself, pursuing valiantly this method, I pointed to the soiled water lilies above Nora’s head. An inspiration seized me. At that time, you must remember, I did know that Nora was engaged to be married to an engineer’s assistant on a lake steamer. I chanced at that moment to see the picture of the water lilies and thought of the little quiet back waters of Sandusky Bay where as a boy I had sometimes gone fishing with a certain charming old country doctor who for a time had employed me, ostensibly as a stable boy but really as a companion on long country drives. The old doctor had been a talkative soul and loved to speculate on life and its purposes and we often went fishing on summer afternoons and evenings, not so much for the purpose of catching fish as to give the doctor the opportunity to sit in a boat on the bank of some stream and pour wisdom into my willing young ears.

And so there I was, in the presence of Nora and that wondering workman, standing with one arm raised and pointing at the cheap chromo on the wall and being as much the actor as I could. Even though my brain was somewhat befuddled I was watching Nora, waiting and hoping that something I might say would really arrest her attention, and now I thought, as I have said, of quiet sweet back waters of bays and rivers, of suns going down in clean evening skies, of my own white bare feet dangling in warm pellucid waters.

To Nora I said the following words, quite without definite thought, as they came flowing from my lips: “I do not know you, young woman, and have never until this moment thought of you and your life but I’ll tell you this: the time will come when you will marry a man who now sails on the seas. Even at this moment he is standing on the deck of a boat and thinking of you, and the air about him is not like this air you and I for our sins are compelled to breathe.”

“Ah ha!” I cried, seeing by a look in Nora’s eyes that my chance shot had hit home and shrewdly following up the advantage that gave me. “Ah ha!” I cried; “let us think and speak of the life of a sailor. He is in the presence of the clean sea. God has made clean the scene upon which his eyes rest. At night he lies down in a clean bunk. Nothing about him is as it is about us. There is no foul air, no dirty streaks on wall paper, no unclean sheets, no unclean beds.”

“Your young sailor lies in bed at night and his body is clean, as I dare say also is his mind. He thinks of his sweetheart on shore and of necessity, do you see, all about him is so clean, he must think of her as one who in her soul is clean.”

And now to my readers I must stop a moment to explain that I speak at length in this way of my conversation with Nora, my triumph with her, as I may I think legitimately call it, because it was a purely literary feat and I am writing, as you know, of the life of a literary man. I had never, when all this occurred, been at sea nor had I ever been aboard a ship, but I had, to be sure, read books and stories regarding ships and the conduct of sailors aboard ships, and in my boyhood I had known a man who was once mate on a river boat on the Mississippi River. He to be sure had spoken more often of the gaudiness rather than the cleanliness of the boats on which he had worked but, as I have said, I was being as literary as I could.

And realizing now that I had by good fortune stumbled upon the right note I went on elaborating the romantic side of the life of the sailor aboard ship, touching upon the hopes and dreams of such a man and pointing out to Nora that it was a great mistake on her part not to have one room in the great house of so many rooms, upon the care of which she could pour some of the natural housewifely qualities with which her nature was, I was certain, so richly endowed.

I saw, you understand, that I had her but was careful not to press my advantage too far. And then, too, I had begun to like her, as all literary men like inordinately those who take seriously their outpourings.

And so I now quickly drove a bargain with Nora. Like herself, I explained, I was lonely and wanting companionship. Strange thoughts and fancies came to me that I would like to tell to another. “We will have a friendship,” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “In the evenings we will walk about together. I will tell you of the strange notions that come into my head and of the marvelous adventures that sometimes occur to me in the life of my fancy. I will do that and you—well, you see, you will take extra good care of my room. You will lavish upon it some of the affection natural to your nature, thinking as you do so, not of me but of your sailor man at sea, and of the time to come when you may make a clean warm nest for him ashore.”

“Poor man,” I said, “you must remember that he is buffeted often by storms, often his life is in danger and often too he is in strange ports where but for his constancy to the thoughts of you, he might get into almost any kind of a muddle with some other woman.”

I had succeeded, you see, by a purely literary trick, in getting myself into Nora’s consciousness as in some way connected with her absent lover.

“But I must not press the matter too far,” I thought, and, stepping back, stood smiling at her as genially as I could.

And then another thought came. “There will be a kind of wrath in her soul at this moment and I must direct it quickly toward someone other than myself.” The workman who, attracted by my loud words at the beginning of my discourse, had come along the hallway and who now stood at the door of my room looking in, did not speak English very well and I was sure had not understood much of my long speech.

Going to the open window I now said, over my shoulder: “I am silly saying all these things to you, Nora, but I have been lonesome and to tell the truth I am a little drunk. Forgive me. You know yourself that the other men in this house are stupid fellows and do not care at all in what shape their rooms are kept. They work like dogs and sleep like dogs and do not have thoughts and dreams as you do and as I and your sailor man do.”

“There is that man listening to our little conversation, there now, by the door,” I said straightening up and pointing; but my speech got no further. As I had conjectured within myself, Nora had for some minutes been anxious to hit someone with the broom that stood close at hand and she now, suddenly and quite unreasonably, decided to hit the workman. Grabbing the broom in her hand she flew at him screaming with wrath. “Can’t we have a little talk, my friend and I, without your sticking in your nose?” she cried, and the workman fled down the hallway with Nora at his heels, striking vigorously at him with the broom.

NOTE II

ONE who like myself could not, because of circumstances, spend the years of his youth in the schools must of necessity turn to books and to the men and women directly about him; upon these he must depend for his knowledge of life and to these I had turned. What a life the people of the books led! They were for the most part such respectable people, with problems I did not have at all or they were such keen and brainy villains as I could never hope to become. Being a Nero a Jesse James or a Napoleon I often thought would suit me first rate but I could not see how I was going to make it. In the first place I never could shoot very well, I hadn’t the courage to kill people I did not like and to steal on any grand scale involved the risk of prison—or at least I then thought it did. I later found that only petty thieves were in danger but at that time, long before I myself became a schemer in business, I knew only petty thieves. At the race tracks some of my friends were always being marched off to prison or I heard of some man I had known being nabbed and taken away and prisons frightened me. I remembered vividly a night of my boyhood and myself going through an alleyway and past our town jail and the white face of a man staring out at me from behind iron bars. “Hey kid, get me an iron bar or a hammer and pass it up here to me and I’ll give you a quarter,” he said in harsh throaty tones but I was frightened at the sight of his white drawn face in the moonlight and at the thoughts of the grim silent place in which he stood. A murderer, a crazed farmer who had killed his wife and hired man with an ax, had once been lodged in the jail and I had got the notion into my head that all men who passed into its doors were terrible and dangerous. I ran quickly away and got out of the alleyway into a lighted street and always afterward I remembered that moment, the stars in the sky, the moonlight shining on the faces of buildings, the quick sharp laughter of a girl somewhere in the darkness on the porch of a house, the sound of a horse’s hoofs in a roadway, all the sweet sounds of free men and women walking about. I wanted to spend my life walking about and looking at things, listening to words, to the sound of winds blowing through trees, smelling life sweet and alive, not put away somewhere in a dark ill-smelling place. Once later when I was working at Columbus, Ohio, I went with a fellow—he had a sickening kind of curiosity about such places and kept urging and urging—to the state prison on visiting day. It was at the hour when the prisoners take exercise and many of them were in a large open place between high walls, on which guards with guns walked up and down. I looked once and then closed my eyes and during the rest of our pilgrimage through the place I carefully avoided looking into the prisoners’ faces or into the cells before which we stopped but looked down instead at the stone floors until we were again outside in the sunlight.

As I have said the books were mostly about respectable people with moral problems, with family fortunes that must be saved or built up, daughters safely married, hints at a possible loss of virtue on the part of some woman and the terrible consequences that were to follow. In the books the women who grew familiar with men, to whom they were not married, were always having children and thus giving themselves away to all and I did not know any such women. The kind of women among whom life at that time threw me were much wiser and pretty much seemed to have children or not as they chose and I presume I thought the other kind must be a rather foolish sort and not worth bothering or thinking about.

And then there was the grand life in the big world, the life of the courts, the field, camp and palace, and in the America of Newport, Boston and New York. It was all a life far away from me but it seemed to occupy the attention of most of the novelists. As for myself I did not think at that time that I would ever see much of such life and I am afraid it did not much tempt me.

However, I read greedily everything that came into my hands. Laura Jean Libbey, Walter Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Fielding, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Balzac, the Bible, Stephen Crane, dime novels, Cooper, Stevenson, our own Mark Twain and Howells and later Whitman. The books—any books—have always fed my dreams and I am one who has always lived by his dreams and even to-day I can often get as much fun and satisfaction out of a dull book as out of a so-called brilliant or witty one. The books like life itself are only useful to me in as much as they feed my own dreams or give me a background upon which I can construct new dreams.

Books I have always had access to and I am sure there is no other country in the world where people in general are so sentimentally romantic on the subject of books and education. Not that we read the books or really care about education. Not we. What we do is to own books and go to colleges and I have known more than one young man without money work his way patiently through college without paying much attention to what the colleges are presumed to teach. The fact of having got through college and of having managed to get a degree satisfies us and so the owning of books has become in most American families a kind of moral necessity. We own the books, put them on the shelves and go to the movies and the books, not being read and sitting dumbly there on the shelves in the houses, fairly jump at anyone who cares for them. It was so also in my own youth. Wherever I went someone was always bringing me books or urging me to come to some house and help myself and having got into most houses I could have helped myself, if books were not offered, simply by re-arranging the shelves so there was no gaping hole left. I did it sometimes but not often.

As for the owners, they were interested, absorbed in the great industrial future just ahead for all Americans. We were all to have college degrees, ride in automobiles, come by some kind of marvelous mechanical process into a new, more cultured and better age, “Clear the track! Come on! Get in the swim!” was the cry and later I was to take up the cry myself and become one of the most valiant of the hustlers but for a time—for several years—I stayed in the backwaters of life and looked about.

My companions for the time being were flash men, the sharpshooters and touts at the race tracks. How many such fellows as Sit-still Murphy, Flatnose Humphrey of Frisco, Horsey Hollister and others of that stripe I knew at that time! And there were also gamblers, a politician or two and most of all a strange kind of sensitive and footloose man or woman, unfitted for the life of a hustler, not shrewd, usually lovable and perplexed, feeling themselves out of touch with the mood of the times and often spending life getting drunk, wandering about and loving to talk away long hours on bridges in cities, on country roads and in the back rooms of little saloons, which for all the evil they are presumed to have brought upon us I thank my gods existed during my youth. How often have I said to myself: “What kind of a world will this be when we are all moral and good people, when there are no more rascals to be found among us and no places left where rascals may congregate to speak lovingly of their rascalities?”

Of the rascals I met at that time there was one of a far different sort than the others who did much to educate me in the ways of the world. I found him in a town of northern Ohio to which I had drifted and in which I had got a job in a stable run by a man named Nate Lovett, who owned several race horses and who also kept a livery barn. Nate had a stallion, a fast trotter named “Will you Please” and got most of his income by taking him about to neighboring towns to serve mares but he had also some ten or twelve half-wornout old driving horses that were let to the young men of the town when they wanted to take some girl to a dance or for a drive in the country. These I took care of, working all day and sleeping on a cot in what we called the office but having my evenings free. A gigantic and goodhearted Negro took care of the racing horses and stayed in the office from eight until eleven in the evening. “Go on child. I ain’t got no folks in this town and I don’t want none here neither,” he said.

Lovett, a man of the English jockey type, had lost one eye in a fight but was a quiet enough fellow, never losing his temper except when someone spoke favorably of the Irish or of the Catholic religion. He had a fixed notion that the Pope at Rome had made up his mind to get control of America and had filled the land with crafty spies and agents who worked tirelessly night and day to accomplish his ends and when he spoke of the Irish Catholics he lowered his voice, put his hand over his mouth, winked, scowled and acted in general like one creeping stealthily through some mountainous country, infested with desperadoes, and in which every tree and stone might conceal a deadly enemy.

At the stable during the long quiet winter afternoons there was little to do so we all gathered in the office, a room some fifteen by twenty with a large stove in the centre. There certain citizens of the town came daily to visit us.

In the room there would be at one time Bert the Negro; Lovett, sitting on a stool and tapping the floor with a driver’s whip; myself, taking in everything and sometimes with my nose in a book; Tom Moseby, who had been a gambler on a Mississippi River boat in his young days and who always wore a large dirty white collar with a black stock; Silas Hunt, a lawyer who had no practice nor seemed to want any and who was said to be writing a book on the subject of constitutional law, a book that no one ever saw; a fat German, who was a follower of Karl Marx and who owned a large farm near the town, but who, for all his anti-capitalistic beliefs, was said to cheat ruthlessly all who had any sort of dealings with him; Billy West, who owned two race horses himself and whose wife ran the town millinery store and who was himself something of a dandy and, last of all, Judge Turner.

The judge was a short fat neatly-dressed man with a bald head, a white Vandyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks and extraordinarily small hands and feet. In his younger days he had a cousin, at one time a quite powerful political figure in Ohio, and after the Civil War the judge, an unsuccessful young lawyer, had managed through the cousin to get himself sent South on some sort of financial mission, to settle, I believe, certain claims covering cotton corn and other stores requisitioned or destroyed by the conquering Union armies.

It had been the great opportunity of the judge’s life and he had taken shrewd advantage of it, had come near being shot in two or three southern cities but had kept his head and had, it was whispered about, well feathered his own and the cousin’s nest. After it was all over and the cousin had fallen from power he had come back to his native place—after three or four years spent in Europe, lying low in fear of a threatened investigation of his operations—and had bought a large brick house with a lawn and trees and had imported a Negro man-servant from the South. He spent his time reading books and listening during the afternoon to the talk of the men of our little circle, flattering women rather grossly, drinking a good deal of raw whisky and delivering himself of rather shrewd observations on life and the men he had known and seen.

The judge had never married and indeed cared nothing for women although he fancied himself in the rôle of a gallant who could do with women as he pleased, a notion constantly fed by the reactions to his advances of the women with whom his life in the town threw him into contact—the wife of the grocer from whom he bought the supplies for his home, a fat girl with red cheeks who clerked in the dry-goods store, Billy West’s wife, and several others. To all these women he was elaborately courteous, bowing before them, making pretty speeches and when no one was watching even boldly caressing them with his little fat hands. In the grocery he even pressed the hand of the merchant’s wife while her lord was engaged, with his back turned, in getting a package down off a shelf, and even sometimes pinched her hips, laughing softly while she shook her head and scowled at him, but to me, for whom he had taken a fancy born of my predilection for books, he spoke of women always with contempt.

“My dislike of them is however but a peculiarity of my own nature and I would not have it influence you in the least,” he explained. “The French, among whom I once lived and whose language I speak, make an art of this matter of love-making between men and women and I admire the French exceedingly. They are a wise and shrewd people and not much given to the talking of tommyrot I assure you.”

The judge had, early in our acquaintance, invited me to his house where I later spent many of my evenings during that spring, drinking his whisky, listening to his talk and smoking cigarettes with him. It was the judge in fact who taught me to smoke cigarettes, a habit much looked down upon in American towns at that time, being taken as an indication of weakness and effeminacy. The judge was, however, able to carry off his own devotion to the habit because he had been in Europe, spoke several languages and most of all because he was reported to be educated. In the saloons of the town, when men congregated before the bar in the evening, the subject of cigarette smoking was often discussed. “If I ever caught a son of mine smoking one of those coffin nails I’d knock his fool head off,” said a drayman. “I agree with you for all except maybe Judge Turner now,” said his companion. “For him it’s all right. He sets a bad example maybe, but looket! Ain’t he been to college and to Paris and London and all them places? Lord, I only wish I had his education, that’s all I wish.”

* * * * *

I am in the judge’s house and it is dark and stormy outside. I have dined with the Negro Bert at six in the kitchen of Nate Lovett’s house and now, although it is but shortly past seven, the judge has also dined and is ready for an evening of talk. There is a large stove of the sort known as a baseburner in the room and the walls are lined with books. We sit by a small table and there is a decanter of whisky upon it. Although I am but eighteen the judge does not hesitate to invite me to help myself to the whisky. “Drink all you want. If you are the kind of a fool who makes a pig of himself you might as well find it out.”

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.