Fall had come on and in the mornings now when we crept out of our

blankets, spread out on the hay in the tiny lofts above the horse

stalls, and put our heads out to look around, there was a white rime of

frost on the ground. When we woke the horses woke too. You know how it

is at the tracks—the little barn-like stalls with the tiny lofts above

are all set along in a row and there are two doors to each stall, one

coming up to a horse’s breast and then a top one, that is only closed at

night and in bad weather.

In the mornings the upper door is swung open and fastened back and the

horses put their heads out. There is the white rime on the grass over

inside the grey oval the track makes. Usually there is some outfit that

has six, ten or even twelve horses, and perhaps they have a negro cook

who does his cooking at an open fire in the clear space before the row

of stalls and he is at work now and the horses with their big fine eyes

are looking about and whinnying, and a stallion looks out at the door of

one of the stalls and sees a sweet-eyed mare looking at him and sends up

his trumpet-call, and a man’s voice laughs, and there are no women

anywhere in sight or no sign of one anywhere, and everyone feels like

laughing and usually does.

It’s pretty fine but I didn’t know how fine it was until I got to know

Tom Means and heard him talk about it all.

At the time the thing happened of which I am trying to tell now Tom was

no longer with me. A week before his owner, Alfred Kreymborg, had taken

his horse Lumpy Joe over into the Ohio Fair Circuit and I saw no more of

Tom at the tracks.

There was a story going about the stalls that Lumpy Joe, a big rangy

brown gelding, wasn’t really named Lumpy Joe at all, that he was a

ringer who had made a fast record out in Iowa and up through the

northwest country the year before, and that Kreymborg had picked him up

and had kept him under wraps all winter and had brought him over into

the Pennsylvania country under this new name and made a clean-up in the

books.

I know nothing about that and never talked to Tom about it but anyway

he, Lumpy Joe and Kreymborg were all gone now.

I suppose I’ll always remember those days, and Tom’s talk at night, and

before that in the early September evenings how we sat around in front

of the stalls, and Kreymborg sitting on an upturned feed box and pulling

at his long black mustache and some times humming a little ditty one

couldn’t catch the words of. It was something about a deep well and a

little grey squirrel crawling up the sides of it, and he never laughed

or smiled much but there was something in his solemn grey eyes, not

quite a twinkle, something more delicate than that.

The others talked in low tones and Tom and I sat in silence. He never

did his best talking except when he and I were alone.

For his sake—if he ever sees my story—I should mention that at the only

big track we ever visited, at Readville, Pennsylvania, we saw old Pop

Geers, the great racing driver, himself. His horses were at a place far

away across the tracks from where we were stabled. I suppose a man like

him was likely to get the choice of all the good places for his horses.

We went over there one evening and stood about and there was Geers

himself, sitting before one of the stalls on a box tapping the ground

with a riding whip. They called him, around the tracks, “The silent man

from Tennessee” and he was silent—that night anyway. All we did was to

stand and look at him for maybe a half hour and then we went away and

that night Tom talked better than I had ever heard him. He said that the

ambition of his life was to wait until Pop Geers died and then write a

book about him, and to show in the book that there was at least one

American who never went nutty about getting rich or owning a big factory

of being any other kind of a hell of a fellow. “He’s satisfied I think

to sit around like that and wait until the big moments of his life come,

when he heads a fast one into the stretch and then, darn his soul, he

can give all of himself to the thing right in front of him,” Tom said,

and then he was so worked up he began to blubber. We were walking along

the fence on the inside of the tracks and it was dusk and, in some trees

nearby, some birds, just sparrows maybe, were making a chirping sound,

and you could hear insects singing and, where there was a little light,

off to the west between some trees, motes were dancing in the air. Tom

said that about Pop Gears, although I think he was thinking most about

something he wanted to be himself and wasn’t, and then he went and stood

by the fence and sort of blubbered and I began to blubber too, although

I didn’t know what about.

But perhaps I did know, after all. I suppose Tom wanted to feel, when he

became a writer, like he thought old Pop must feel when his horse swung

around the upper turn, and there lay the stretch before him, and if he

was going to get his horse home in front he had to do it right then.

What Tom said was that any man had something in him that understands

about a thing like that but that no woman ever did except up in her

brain. He often got off things like that about women but I notice he

later married one of them just the same.

But to get back to my knitting. After Tom had left, the stable I was

with kept drifting along through nice little Pennsylvania county seat

towns. My owner, a strange excitable kind of a man from over in Ohio,

who had lost a lot of money on horses but was always thinking he would

maybe get it all back in some big killing, had been playing in pretty

good luck that year. The horse I had, a tough little gelding, a five

year old, had been getting home in front pretty regular and so he took

some of his winnings and bought a three years old black pacing stallion

named “O, My Man.” My gelding was called “Pick-it-boy” because when he

was in a race and had got into the stretch my owner always got half wild

with excitement and shouted so you could hear him a mile and a half.

“Go, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy,” he kept shouting and so

when he had got hold of this good little gelding he had named him that.

The gelding was a fast one, all right. As the boys at the tracks used to

say, he “picked ’em up sharp and set ’em down clean,” and he was what we

called a natural race horse, right up to all the speed he had, and

didn’t require much training. “All you got to do is to drop him down on

the track and he’ll go,” was what my owner was always saying to other

men, when he was bragging about his horse.

And so you see, after Tom left, I hadn’t much to do evenings and then

the new stallion, the three year old, came on with a negro swipe named

Burt.

I liked him fine and he liked me but not the same as Tom and me. We got

to be friends all right and I suppose Burt would have done things for

me, and maybe me for him, that Tom and me wouldn’t have done for each

other.

But with a negro you couldn’t be close friends like you can with another

white man. There’s some reason you can’t understand but it’s true.

There’s been too much talk about the difference between whites and

blacks and you’re both shy, and anyway no use trying and I suppose Burt

and I both knew it and so I was pretty lonesome.

Something happened to me that happened several times, when I was a young

fellow, that I have never exactly understood. Sometimes now I think it

was all because I had got to be almost a man and had never been with a

woman. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I can’t ask a woman. I’ve

tried it a good many times in my life but every time I’ve tried the same

thing happened.

Of course, with Jessie now, it’s different, but at the time of which I’m

speaking Jessie was a long ways off and a good many things were to

happen to me before I got to her.

Around a race track, as you may suppose, the fellows who are swipes and

drivers and strangers in the towns do not go without women. They don’t

have to. In any town there are always some fly girls will come around a

place like that. I suppose they think they are fooling with men who lead

romantic lives. Such girls will come along by the front of the stalls

where the race horses are and, if you look all right to them, they will

stop and make a fuss over your horse. They rub their little hands over

the horse’s nose and then is the time for you—if you aren’t a fellow

like me who can’t get up the nerve—then is the time for you to smile and

say, “Hello, kid,” and make a date with one of them for that evening up

town after supper. I couldn’t do that, although the Lord knows I tried

hard enough, often enough. A girl would come along alone, and she would

be a little thing and give me the eye, and I would try and try but

couldn’t say anything. Both Tom, and Burt afterwards, used to laugh at

me about it sometimes but what I think is that, had I been able to speak

up to one of them and had managed to make a date with her, nothing would

have come of it. We would probably have walked around the town and got

off together in the dark somewhere, where the town came to an end, and

then she would have had to knock me over with a club before it got any

further.

And so there I was, having got used to Tom and our talks together, and

Burt of course had his own friends among the black men. I got lazy and

mopey and had a hard time doing my work.

It was like this. Sometimes I would be sitting, perhaps under a tree in

the late afternoon when the races were over for the day and the crowds

had gone away. There were always a lot of other men and boys who hadn’t

any horses in the races that day and they would be standing or sitting

about in front of the stalls and talking.

I would listen for a time to their talk and then their voices would seem

to go far away. The things I was looking at would go far away too.

Perhaps there would be a tree, not more than a hundred yards away, and

it would just come out of the ground and float away like a thistle. It

would get smaller and smaller, away off there in the sky, and then

suddenly—bang, it would be back where it belonged, in the ground, and I

would begin hearing the voices of the men talking again.

When Tom was with me that summer the nights were splendid. We usually

walked about and talked until pretty late and then I crawled up into my

hole and went to sleep. Always out of Tom’s talk I got something that

stayed in my mind, after I was off by myself, curled up in my blanket. I

suppose he had a way of making pictures as he talked and the pictures

stayed by me as Burt was always saying pork chops did by him. “Give me

the old pork chops, they stick to the ribs,” Burt was always saying and

with the imagination it was always that way about Tom’s talks. He

started something inside you that went on and on, and your mind played

with it like walking about in a strange town and seeing the sights, and

you slipped off to sleep and had splendid dreams and woke up in the

morning feeling fine.

And then he was gone and it wasn’t that way any more and I got into the

fix I have described. At night I kept seeing women’s bodies and women’s

lips and things in my dreams, and woke up in the morning feeling like

the old Harry.

Burt was pretty good to me. He always helped me cool Pick-it-boy out

after a race and he did the things himself that take the most skill and

quickness, like getting the bandages on a horse’s leg smooth, and seeing

that every strap is setting just right, and every buckle drawn up to

just the right hole, before your horse goes out on the track for a heat.

Burt knew there was something wrong with me and put himself out not to

let the boss know. When the boss was around he was always bragging about

me. “The brightest kid I’ve ever worked with around the tracks,” he

would say and grin, and that at a time when I wasn’t worth my salt.

When you go out with the horses there is one job that always takes a lot

of time. In the late afternoon, after your horse has been in a race and

after you have washed him and rubbed him out, he has to be walked

slowly, sometimes for hours and hours, so he’ll cool out slowly and

won’t get muscle-bound. I got so I did that job for both our horses and

Burt did the more important things. It left him free to go talk or shoot

dice with the other niggers and I didn’t mind. I rather liked it and

after a hard race even the stallion, O My Man, was tame enough, even

when there were mares about.

You walk and walk and walk, around a little circle, and your horse’s

head is right by your shoulder, and all around you the life of the place

you are in is going on, and in a queer way you get so you aren’t really

a part of it at all. Perhaps no one ever gets as I was then, except boys

that aren’t quite men yet and who like me have never been with girls or

women—to really be with them, up to the hilt, I mean. I used to wonder

if young girls got that way too before they married or did what we used

to call “go on the town.”

If I remember it right though, I didn’t do much thinking then. Often I

would have forgotten supper if Burt hadn’t shouted at me and reminded

me, and sometimes he forgot and went off to town with one of the other

niggers and I did forget.

There I was with the horse, going slow slow slow, around a circle that

way. The people were leaving the fair grounds now, some afoot, some

driving away to the farms in wagons and fords. Clouds of dust floated in

the air and over to the west, where the town was, maybe the sun was

going down, a red ball of fire through the dust. Only a few hours before

the crowd had been all filled with excitement and everyone shouting. Let

us suppose my horse had been in a race that afternoon and I had stood in

front of the grandstand with my horse blanket over my shoulder,

alongside of Burt perhaps, and when they came into the stretch my owner

began to call, in that queer high voice of his that seemed to float over

the top of all the shouting up in the grandstand. And his voice was

saying over and over, “Go, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy,” the

way he always did, and my heart was thumping so I could hardly breathe,

and Burt was leaning over and snapping his fingers and muttering, “Come,

little sweet. Come on home. Your Mama wants you. Come get your ’lasses

and bread, little Pick-it-boy.”

Well, all that was over now and the voices of the people left around

were all low. And Pick-it-boy—I was leading him slowly around the little

ring, to cool him out slowly, as I’ve said,—he was different too. Maybe

he had pretty nearly broken his heart trying to get down to the wire in

front, or getting down there in front, and now everything inside him was

quiet and tired, as it was nearly all the time those days in me, except

in me tired but not quiet.

You remember I’ve told you we always walked in a circle, round and round

and round. I guess something inside me got to going round and round and

round too. The sun did sometimes and the trees and the clouds of dust. I

had to think sometimes about putting down my feet so they went down in

the right place and I didn’t get to staggering like a drunken man.

And a funny feeling came that it is going to be hard to describe. It had

something to do with the life in the horse and in me. Sometimes, these

late years, I’ve thought maybe negroes would understand what I’m trying

to talk about now better than any white man ever will. I mean something

about men and animals, something between them, something that can

perhaps only happen to a white man when he has slipped off his base a

little, as I suppose I had then. I think maybe a lot of horsey people

feel it sometimes though. It’s something like this, maybe—do you suppose

it could be that something we whites have got, and think such a lot of,

and are so proud about, isn’t much of any good after all?

It’s something in us that wants to be big and grand and important maybe

and won’t let us just be, like a horse or a dog or a bird can. Let’s say

Pick-it-boy had won his race that day. He did that pretty often that

summer. Well, he was neither proud, like I would have been in his place,

or mean in one part of the inside of him either. He was just himself,

doing something with a kind of simplicity. That’s what Pick-it-boy was

like and I got to feeling it in him as I walked with him slowly in the

gathering darkness. I got inside him in some way I can’t explain and he

got inside me. Often we would stop walking for no cause and he would put

his nose up against my face.

I wished he was a girl sometimes or that I was a girl and he was a man.

It’s an odd thing to say but it’s a fact. Being with him that way, so

long, and in such a quiet way, cured something in me a little. Often

after an evening like that I slept all right and did not have the kind

of dreams I’ve spoken about.

But I wasn’t cured for very long and couldn’t get cured. My body seemed

all right and just as good as ever but there wasn’t no pep in me.

Then the fall got later and later and we came to the last town we were

going to make before my owner laid his horses up for the winter, in his

home town over across the State line in Ohio, and the track was up on a

hill, or rather in a kind of high plain above the town.

It wasn’t much of a place and the sheds were rather rickety and the

track bad, especially at the turns. As soon as we got to the place and

got stabled it began to rain and kept it up all week so the fair had to

be put off.

As the purses weren’t very large a lot of the owners shipped right out

but our owner stayed. The fair owners guaranteed expenses, whether the

races were held the next week or not.

And all week there wasn’t much of anything for Burt and me to do but

clean manure out of the stalls in the morning, watch for a chance when

the rain let up a little to jog the horses around the track in the mud

and then clean them off, blanket them and stick them back in their

stalls.

It was the hardest time of all for me. Burt wasn’t so bad off as there

were a dozen or two blacks around and in the evening they went off to

town, got liquored-up a little and came home late, singing and talking,

even in the cold rain.

And then one night I got mixed up in the thing I’m trying to tell you

about.

* * * * *

It was a Saturday evening and when I look back at it now it seems to me

everyone had left the tracks but just me. In the early evening swipe

after swipe came over to my stall and asked me if I was going to stick

around. When I said I was he would ask me to keep an eye out for him,

that nothing happened to his horse. “Just take a stroll down that way

now and then, eh, kid,” one of them would say, “I just want to run up to

town for an hour or two.”

I would say “yes” to be sure, and so pretty soon it was dark as pitch up

there in that little ruined fairground and nothing living anywhere

around but the horses and me.

I stood it as long as I could, walking here and there in the mud and

rain, and thinking all the time I wished I was someone else and not

myself. “If I were someone else,” I thought, “I wouldn’t be here but

down there in town with the others.” I saw myself going into saloons and

having drinks and later going off to a house maybe and getting myself a

woman.

I got to thinking so much that, as I went stumbling around up there in

the darkness, it was as though what was in my mind was actually

happening.

Only I wasn’t with some cheap woman, such as I would have found had I

had the nerve to do what I wanted but with such a woman as I thought

then I should never find in this world. She was slender and like a

flower and with something in her like a race horse too, something in her

like Pick-it-boy in the stretch, I guess.

And I thought about her and thought about her until I couldn’t stand

thinking any more. “I’ll do something anyway,” I said to myself.

So, although I had told all the swipes I would stay and watch their

horses, I went out of the fair grounds and down the hill a ways. I went

down until I came to a little low saloon, not in the main part of the

town itself but half way up the hillside. The saloon had once been a

residence, a farmhouse perhaps, but if it was ever a farmhouse I’m sure

the farmer who lived there and worked the land on that hillside hadn’t

made out very well. The country didn’t look like a farming country, such

as one sees all about the other county-seat towns we had been visiting

all through the late summer and fall. Everywhere you looked there were

stones sticking out of the ground and the trees mostly of the stubby,

stunted kind. It looked wild and untidy and ragged, that’s what I mean.

On the flat plain, up above, where the fairground was, there were a few

fields and pastures, and there were some sheep raised and in the field

right next to the tracks, on the furtherest side from town, on the back

stretch side, there had once been a slaughter-house, the ruins of which

were still standing. It hadn’t been used for quite some time but there

were bones of animals lying all about in the field, and there was a

smell coming out of the old building that would curl your hair.

The horses hated the place, just as we swipes did, and in the morning

when we were jogging them around the track in the mud, to keep them in

racing condition, Pick-it-boy and O My Man both raised old Ned every

time we headed them up the back stretch and got near to where the old

slaughter-house stood. They would rear and fight at the bit, and go off

their stride and run until they got clear of the rotten smells, and

neither Burt nor I could make them stop it. “It’s a hell of a town down

there and this is a hell of a track for racing,” Burt kept saying. “If

they ever have their danged old fair someone’s going to get spilled and

maybe killed back here.” Whether they did or not I don’t know as I

didn’t stay for the fair, for reasons I’ll tell you pretty soon, but

Burt was speaking sense all right. A race horse isn’t like a human

being. He won’t stand for it to have to do his work in any rotten ugly

kind of a dump the way a man will, and he won’t stand for the smells a

man will either.

But to get back to my story again. There I was, going down the hillside

in the darkness and the cold soaking rain and breaking my word to all

the others about staying up above and watching the horses. When I got to

the little saloon I decided to stop and have a drink or two. I’d found

out long before that about two drinks upset me so I was two-thirds piped

and couldn’t walk straight, but on that night I didn’t care a tinker’s

dam.

So I went up a kind of path, out of the road, toward the front door of

the saloon. It was in what must have been the parlor of the place when

it was a farmhouse and there was a little front porch.

I stopped before I opened the door and looked about a little. From where

I stood I could look right down into the main street of the town, like

being in a big city, like New York or Chicago, and looking down out of

the fifteenth floor of an office building into the street.

The hillside was mighty steep and the road up had to wind and wind or no

one could ever have come up out of the town to their plagued old fair at

all.

It wasn’t much of a town I saw—a main street with a lot of saloons and a

few stores, one or two dinky moving-picture places, a few fords, hardly

any women or girls in sight and a raft of men. I tried to think of the

girl I had been dreaming about, as I walked around in the mud and

darkness up at the fair ground, living in the place but I couldn’t make

it. It was like trying to think of Pick-it-boy getting himself worked up

to the state I was in then, and going into the ugly dump I was going

into. It couldn’t be done.

All the same I knew the town wasn’t all right there in sight. There must

have been a good many of the kinds of houses Pennsylvania miners live in

back in the hills, or around a turn in the valley in which the main

street stood.

What I suppose is that, it being Saturday night and raining, the women

and kids had all stayed at home and only the men were out, intending to

get themselves liquored-up. I’ve been in some other mining towns since

and if I was a miner and had to live in one of them, or in one of the

houses they live in with their women and kids, I’d get out and liquor

myself up too.

So there I stood looking, and as sick as a dog inside myself, and as wet

and cold as a rat in a sewer pipe. I could see the mass of dark figures

moving about down below, and beyond the main street there was a river

that made a sound you could hear distinctly, even up where I was, and

over beyond the river were some railroad tracks with switch engines

going up and down. I suppose they had something to do with the mines in

which the men of the town worked. Anyway, as I stood watching and

listening there was, now and then, a sound like thunder rolling down the

sky, and I suppose that was a lot of coal, maybe a whole carload, being

let down plunk into a coal car.

And then besides there was, on the side of a hill far away, a long row

of coke ovens. They had little doors, through which the light from the

fire within leaked out and as they were set closely, side by side, they

looked like the teeth of some big man-eating giant lying and waiting

over there in the hills.

The sight of it all, even the sight of the kind of hellholes men are

satisfied to go on living in, gave me the fantods and the shivers right

down in my liver, and on that night I guess I had in me a kind of

contempt for all men, including myself, that I’ve never had so

thoroughly since. Come right down to it, I suppose women aren’t so much

to blame as men. They aren’t running the show.

* * * * *

Then I pushed open the door and went into the saloon. There were about a

dozen men, miners I suppose, playing cards at tables in a little long

dirty room, with a bar at one side of it, and with a big red-faced man

with a mustache standing back of the bar.

The place smelled, as such places do where men hang around who have

worked and sweated in their clothes and perhaps slept in them too, and

have never had them washed but have just kept on wearing them. I guess

you know what I mean if you’ve ever been in a city. You smell that smell

in a city, in street-cars on rainy nights when a lot of factory hands

get on. I got pretty used to that smell when I was a tramp and pretty

sick of it too.

And so I was in the place now, with a glass of whisky in my hand, and I

thought all the miners were staring at me, which they weren’t at all,

but I thought they were and so I felt just the same as though they had

been. And then I looked up and saw my own face in the old cracked

looking-glass back of the bar. If the miners had been staring, or

laughing at me, I wouldn’t have wondered when I saw what I looked like.

It—I mean my own face—was white and pasty-looking, and for some reason,

I can’t tell exactly why, it wasn’t my own face at all. It’s a funny

business I’m trying to tell you about and I know what you may be

thinking of me as well as you do, so you needn’t suppose I’m innocent or

ashamed. I’m only wondering. I’ve thought about it a lot since and I

can’t make it out. I know I was never that way before that night and I

know I’ve never been that way since. Maybe it was lonesomeness, just

lonesomeness, gone on in me too long. I’ve often wondered if women

generally are lonesomer than men.

The point is that the face I saw in the looking-glass back of that bar,

when I looked up from my glass of whisky that evening, wasn’t my own

face at all but the face of a woman. It was a girl’s face, that’s what I

mean. That’s what it was. It was a girl’s face, and a lonesome and

scared girl too. She was just a kid at that.

When I saw that the glass of whisky came pretty near falling out of my

hand but I gulped it down, put a dollar on the bar, and called for

another. “I’ve got to be careful here—I’m up against something new,” I

said to myself. “If any of these men in here get on to me there’s going

to be trouble.” When I had got the second drink in me I called for a

third and I thought, “When I get this third drink down I’ll get out of

here and back up the hill to the fair ground before I make a fool of

myself and begin to get drunk.”

And then, while I was thinking and drinking my third glass of whisky,

the men in the room began to laugh and of course I thought they were

laughing at me. But they weren’t. No one in the place had really paid

any attention to me.

What they were laughing at was a man who had just come in at the door.

I’d never seen such a fellow. He was a huge big man, with red hair, that

stuck straight up like bristles out of his head, and he had a red-haired

kid in his arms. The kid was just like himself, big, I mean, for his

age, and with the same kind of stiff red hair.

He came and set the kid up on the bar, close beside me, and called for a

glass of whisky for himself and all the men in the room began to shout

and laugh at him and his kid. Only they didn’t shout and laugh when he

was looking, so he could tell which ones did it, but did all their

shouting and laughing when his head was turned the other way. They kept

calling him “cracked.” “The crack is getting wider in the old tin pan,”

someone sang and then they all laughed.

I’m puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. I

suppose, having undertaken to write this story, that’s what I’m up

against, trying to do that. I’m not claiming to be able to inform you or

to do you any good. I’m just trying to make you understand some things

about me, as I would like to understand some things about you, or

anyone, if I had the chance. Anyway the whole blamed thing, the thing

that went on I mean in that little saloon on that rainy Saturday night,

wasn’t like anything quite real. I’ve already told you how I had looked

into the glass back of the bar and had seen there, not my own face but

the face of a scared young girl. Well, the men, the miners, sitting at

the tables in the half dark room, the red-faced bartender, the unholy

looking big man who had come in and his queer-looking kid, now sitting

on the bar—all of them were like characters in some play, not like real

people at all.

There was myself, that wasn’t myself—and I’m not any fairy. Anyone who

has ever known me knows better than that.

And then there was the man who had come in. There was a feeling came out

of him that wasn’t like the feeling you get from a man at all. It was

more like the feeling you get maybe from a horse, only his eyes weren’t

like a horse’s eyes. Horses’ eyes have a kind of calm something in them

and his hadn’t. If you’ve ever carried a lantern through a wood at

night, going along a path, and then suddenly you felt something funny in

the air and stopped, and there ahead of you somewhere were the eyes of

some little animal, gleaming out at you from a dead wall of darkness—The

eyes shine big and quiet but there is a point right in the centre of

each, where there is something dancing and wavering. You aren’t afraid

the little animal will jump at you, you are afraid the little eyes will

jump at you—that’s what’s the matter with you.

Only of course a horse, when you go into his stall at night, or a little

animal you had disturbed in a wood that way, wouldn’t be talking and the

big man who had come in there with his kid was talking. He kept talking

all the time, saying something under his breath, as they say, and I

could only understand now and then a few words. It was his talking made

him kind of terrible. His eyes said one thing and his lips another. They

didn’t seem to get together, as though they belonged to the same person.

For one thing the man was too big. There was about him an unnatural

bigness. It was in his hands, his arms, his shoulders, his body, his

head, a bigness like you might see in trees and bushes in a tropical

country perhaps. I’ve never been in a tropical country but I’ve seen

pictures. Only his eyes were small. In his big head they looked like the

eyes of a bird. And I remember that his lips were thick, like negroes’

lips.

He paid no attention to me or to the others in the room but kept on

muttering to himself, or to the kid sitting on the bar—I couldn’t tell

to which.

First he had one drink and then, quick, another. I stood staring at him

and thinking—a jumble of thoughts, I suppose.

What I must have been thinking was something like this. “Well he’s one

of the kind you are always seeing about towns,” I thought. I meant he

was one of the cracked kind. In almost any small town you go to you will

find one, and sometimes two or three cracked people, walking around.

They go through the street, muttering to themselves and people generally

are cruel to them. Their own folks make a bluff at being kind, but they

aren’t really, and the others in the town, men and boys, like to tease

them. They send such a fellow, the mild silly kind, on some fool errand

after a round square or a dozen post-holes or tie cards on his back

saying “Kick me,” or something like that, and then carry on and laugh as

though they had done something funny.

And so there was this cracked one in that saloon and I could see the men

in there wanted to have some fun putting up some kind of horseplay on

him, but they didn’t quite dare. He wasn’t one of the mild kind, that

was a cinch. I kept looking at the man and at his kid, and then up at

that strange unreal reflection of myself in the cracked looking-glass

back of the bar. “Rats, rats, digging in the ground—miners are rats,

little jack-rabbit,” I heard him say to his solemn-faced kid. I guess,

after all, maybe he wasn’t so cracked.

The kid sitting on the bar kept blinking at his father, like an owl

caught out in the daylight, and now the father was having another glass

of whisky. He drank six glasses, one right after the other, and it was

cheap ten-cent stuff. He must have had cast-iron insides all right.

Of the men in the room there were two or three (maybe they were really

more scared than the others so had to put up a bluff of bravery by

showing off) who kept laughing and making funny cracks about the big man

and his kid and there was one fellow was the worst of the bunch. I’ll

never forget that fellow because of his looks and what happened to him

afterwards.

He was one of the showing-off kind all right, and he was the one that

had started the song about the crack getting bigger in the old tin pan.

He sang it two or three times, and then he grew bolder and got up and

began walking up and down the room singing it over and over. He was a

showy kind of man with a fancy vest, on which there were brown tobacco

spots, and he wore glasses. Every time he made some crack he thought was

funny, he winked at the others as though to say, “You see me. I’m not

afraid of this big fellow,” and then the others laughed.

The proprietor of the place must have known what was going on, and the

danger in it, because he kept leaning over the bar and saying, “Shush,

now quit it,” to the showy-off man, but it didn’t do any good. The

fellow kept prancing like a turkey-cock and he put his hat on one side

of his head and stopped right back of the big man and sang that song

about the crack in the old tin pan. He was one of the kind you can’t

shush until they get their blocks knocked off, and it didn’t take him

long to come to it that time anyhow.

Because the big fellow just kept on muttering to his kid and drinking

his whisky, as though he hadn’t heard anything, and then suddenly he

turned and his big hand flashed out and he grabbed, not the fellow who

had been showing off, but me. With just a sweep of his arm he brought me

up against his big body. Then he shoved me over with my breast jammed

against the bar and looking right into his kid’s face and he said, “Now

you watch him, and if you let him fall I’ll kill you,” in just quiet

ordinary tones as though he was saying “good morning” to some neighbor.

Then the kid leaned over and threw his arms around my head, and in spite

of that I did manage to screw my head around enough to see what

happened.

It was a sight I’ll never forget. The big fellow had whirled around, and

he had the showy-off man by the shoulder now, and the fellow’s face was

a sight. The big man must have had some reputation as a bad man in the

town, even though he was cracked for the man with the fancy vest had his

mouth open now, and his hat had fallen off his head, and he was silent

and scared. Once, when I was a tramp, I saw a kid killed by a train. The

kid was walking on the rail and showing off before some other kids, by

letting them see how close he could let an engine come to him before he

got out of the way. And the engine was whistling and a woman, over on

the porch of a house nearby, was jumping up and down and screaming, and

the kid let the engine get nearer and nearer, wanting more and more to

show off, and then he stumbled and fell. God, I’ll never forget the look

on his face, in just the second before he got hit and killed, and now,

there in that saloon, was the same terrible look on another face.

I closed my eyes for a moment and was sick all through me and then, when

I opened my eyes, the big man’s fist was just coming down in the other

man’s face. The one blow knocked him cold and he fell down like a beast

hit with an axe.

And then the most terrible thing of all happened. The big man had on

heavy boots, and he raised one of them and brought it down on the other

man’s shoulder, as he lay white and groaning on the floor. I could hear

the bones crunch and it made me so sick I could hardly stand up, but I

had to stand up and hold on to that kid or I knew it would be my turn

next.

Because the big fellow didn’t seem excited or anything, but kept on

muttering to himself as he had been doing when he was standing

peacefully by the bar drinking his whisky, and now he had raised his

foot again, and maybe this time he would bring it down in the other

man’s face and, “just eliminate his map for keeps,” as sports and

prize-fighters sometimes say. I trembled, like I was having a chill, but

thank God at that moment the kid, who had his arms around me and one

hand clinging to my nose, so that there were the marks of his

finger-nails on it the next morning, at that moment the kid, thank God,

began to howl, and his father didn’t bother any more with the man on the

floor but turned around, knocked me aside, and taking the kid in his

arms tramped out of that place, muttering to himself as he had been

doing ever since he came in.

I went out too but I didn’t prance out with any dignity, I’ll tell you

that. I slunk out like a thief or a coward, which perhaps I am, partly

anyhow.

And so there I was, outside there in the darkness, and it was as cold

and wet and black and Godforsaken a night as any man ever saw. I was so

sick at the thought of human beings that night I could have vomited to

think of them at all. For a while I just stumbled along in the mud of

the road, going up the hill, back to the fair ground, and then, almost

before I knew where I was, I found myself in the stall with Pick-it-boy.

That was one of the best and sweetest feelings I’ve ever had in my whole

life, being in that warm stall alone with that horse that night. I had

told the other swipes that I would go up and down the row of stalls now

and then and have an eye on the other horses, but I had altogether

forgotten my promise now. I went and stood with my back against the side

of the stall, thinking how mean and low and all balled-up and twisted-up

human beings can become, and how the best of them are likely to get that

way any time, just because they are human beings and not simple and

clear in their minds, and inside themselves, as animals are, maybe.

Perhaps you know how a person feels at such a moment. There are things

you think of, odd little things you had thought you had forgotten. Once,

when you were a kid, you were with your father, and he was all dressed

up, as for a funeral or Fourth of July, and was walking along a street

holding your hand. And you were going past a railroad station, and there

was a woman standing. She was a stranger in your town and was dressed as

you had never seen a woman dressed before, and never thought you would

see one, looking so nice. Long afterwards you knew that was because she

had lovely taste in clothes, such as so few women have really, but then

you thought she must be a queen. You had read about queens in fairy

stories and the thoughts of them thrilled you. What lovely eyes the

strange lady had and what beautiful rings she wore on her fingers.

Then your father came out, from being in the railroad station, maybe to

set his watch by the station clock, and took you by the hand and he and

the woman smiled at each other, in an embarrassed kind of way, and you

kept looking longingly back at her, and when you were out of her hearing

you asked your father if she really were a queen. And it may be that

your father was one who wasn’t so very hot on democracy and a free

country and talked-up bunk about a free citizenry, and he said he hoped

she was a queen, and maybe, for all he knew, she was.

Or maybe, when you get jammed up as I was that night, and can’t get

things clear about yourself or other people and why you are alive, or

for that matter why anyone you can think about is alive, you think, not

of people at all but of other things you have seen and felt—like walking

along a road in the snow in the winter, perhaps out in Iowa, and hearing

soft warm sounds in a barn close to the road, or of another time when

you were on a hill and the sun was going down and the sky suddenly

became a great soft-colored bowl, all glowing like a jewel-handled bowl,

a great queen in some far away mighty kingdom might have put on a vast

table out under the tree, once a year, when she invited all her loyal

and loving subjects to come and dine with her.

I can’t, of course, figure out what you try to think about when you are

as desolate as I was that night. Maybe you are like me and inclined to

think of women, and maybe you are like a man I met once, on the road,

who told me that when he was up against it he never thought of anything

but grub and a big nice clean warm bed to sleep in. “I don’t care about

anything else and I don’t ever let myself think of anything else,” he

said. “If I was like you and went to thinking about women sometime I’d

find myself hooked up to some skirt, and she’d have the old double cross

on me, and the rest of my life maybe I’d be working in some factory for

her and her kids.”

As I say, there I was anyway, up there alone with that horse in that

warm stall in that dark lonesome fair ground and I had that feeling

about being sick at the thought of human beings and what they could be

like.

Well, suddenly I got again the queer feeling I’d had about him once or

twice before, I mean the feeling about our understanding each other in

some way I can’t explain.

So having it again I went over to where he stood and began running my

hands all over his body, just because I loved the feel of him and as

sometimes, to tell the plain truth, I’ve felt about touching with my

hands the body of a woman I’ve seen and who I thought was lovely too. I

ran my hands over his head and neck and then down over his hard firm

round body and then over his flanks and down his legs. His flanks

quivered a little I remember and once he turned his head and stuck his

cold nose down along my neck and nipped my shoulder a little, in a soft

playful way. It hurt a little but I didn’t care.

So then I crawled up through a hole into the loft above thinking that

night was over anyway and glad of it, but it wasn’t, not by a long

sight.

As my clothes were all soaking wet and as we race track swipes didn’t

own any such things as night-gowns or pajamas I had to go to bed naked,

of course.

But we had plenty of horse blankets and so I tucked myself in between a

pile of them and tried not to think any more that night. The being with

Pick-it-boy and having him close right under me that way made me feel a

little better.

Then I was sound asleep and dreaming and—bang like being hit with a club

by someone who has sneaked up behind you—I got another wallop.

What I suppose is that, being upset the way I was, I had forgotten to

bolt the door to Pick-it-boy’s stall down below and two negro men had

come in there, thinking they were in their own place, and had climbed up

through the hole where I was. They were half lit up but not what you

might call dead drunk, and I suppose they were up against something a

couple of white swipes, who had some money in their pockets, wouldn’t

have been up against.

What I mean is that a couple of white swipes, having liquored themselves

up and being down there in the town on a bat, if they wanted a woman or

a couple of women would have been able to find them. There is always a

few women of that kind can be found around any town I’ve ever seen or

heard of, and of course a bar tender would have given them the tip where

to go.

But a negro, up there in that country, where there aren’t any, or anyway

mighty few negro women, wouldn’t know what to do when he felt that way

and would be up against it.

It’s so always. Burt and several other negroes I’ve known pretty well

have talked to me about it, lots of times. You take now a young negro

man—not a race track swipe or a tramp or any other low-down kind of a

fellow—but, let us say, one who has been to college, and has behaved

himself and tried to be a good man, the best he could, and be clean, as

they say. He isn’t any better off, is he? If he has made himself some

money and wants to go sit in a swell restaurant, or go to hear some good

music, or see a good play at the theatre, he gets what we used to call

on the tracks, “the messy end of the dung fork,” doesn’t he?

And even in such a low-down place as what people call a “bad house” it’s

the same way. The white swipes and others can go into a place where they

have negro women fast enough, and they do it too, but you let a negro

swipe try it the other way around and see how he comes out.

You see, I can think this whole thing out fairly now, sitting here in my

own house and writing, and with my wife Jessie in the kitchen making a

pie or something, and I can show just how the two negro men who came

into that loft, where I was asleep, were justified in what they did, and

I can preach about how the negroes are up against it in this country,

like a daisy, but I tell you what, I didn’t think things out that way

that night.

For, you understand, what they thought, they being half liquored-up, and

when one of them had jerked the blankets off me, was that I was a woman.

One of them carried a lantern but it was smoky and dirty and didn’t give

out much light. So they must have figured it out—my body being pretty

white and slender then, like a young girl’s body I suppose—that some

white swipe had brought me up there. The kind of girls around a town

that will come with a swipe to a race track on a rainy night aren’t very

fancy females but you’ll find that kind in the towns all right. I’ve

seen many a one in my day.

And so, I figure, these two big buck niggers, being piped that way, just

made up their minds they would snatch me away from the white swipe who

had brought me out there, and who had left me lying carelessly around.

“Jes’ you lie still honey. We ain’t gwine hurt you none,” one of them

said, with a little chuckling laugh that had something in it besides a

laugh, too. It was the kind of laugh that gives you the shivers.

The devil of it was I couldn’t say anything, not even a word. Why I

couldn’t yell out and say “What the hell,” and just kid them a little

and shoo them out of there I don’t know, but I couldn’t. I tried and

tried so that my throat hurt but I didn’t say a word. I just lay there

staring at them.

It was a mixed-up night. I’ve never gone through another night like it.

Was I scared? Lord Almighty, I’ll tell you what, I was scared.

Because the two big black faces were leaning right over me now, and I

could feel their liquored-up breaths on my cheeks, and their eyes were

shining in the dim light from that smoky lantern, and right in the

centre of their eyes was that dancing flickering light I’ve told you

about your seeing in the eyes of wild animals, when you were carrying a

lantern through the woods at night.

It was a puzzler! All my life, you see—me never having had any sisters,

and at that time never having had a sweetheart either—I had been

dreaming and thinking about women, and I suppose I’d always been

dreaming about a pure innocent one, for myself, made for me by God,

maybe. Men are that way. No matter how big they talk about “let the

women go hang,” they’ve always got that notion tucked away inside

themselves, somewhere. It’s a kind of chesty man’s notion, I suppose,

but they’ve got it and the kind of up-and-coming women we have nowdays

who are always saying, “I’m as good as a man and will do what the men

do,” are on the wrong trail if they really ever want to, what you might

say “hog-tie” a fellow of their own.

So I had invented a kind of princess, with black hair and a slender

willowy body to dream about. And I thought of her as being shy and

afraid to ever tell anything she really felt to anyone but just me. I

suppose I fancied that if I ever found such a woman in the flesh I would

be the strong sure one and she the timid shrinking one.

And now I was that woman, or something like her, myself.

I gave a kind of wriggle, like a fish, you have just taken off the hook.

What I did next wasn’t a thought-out thing. I was caught and I squirmed,

that’s all.

The two niggers both jumped at me but somehow—the lantern having been

kicked over and having gone out the first move they made—well in some

way, when they both lunged at me they missed.

As good luck would have it my feet found the hole, where you put hay

down to the horse in the stall below, and through which we crawled up

when it was time to go to bed in our blankets up in the hay, and down I

slid, not bothering to try to find the ladder with my feet but just

letting myself go.

In less than a second I was out of doors in the dark and the rain and

the two blacks were down the hole and out the door of the stall after

me.

How long or how far they really followed me I suppose I’ll never know.

It was black dark and raining hard now and a roaring wind had begun to

blow. Of course, my body being white, it must have made some kind of a

faint streak in the darkness as I ran, and anyway I thought they could

see me and I knew I couldn’t see them and that made my terror ten times

worse. Every minute I thought they would grab me.

You know how it is when a person is all upset and full of terror as I

was. I suppose maybe the two niggers followed me for a while, running

across the muddy race track and into the grove of trees that grew in the

oval inside the track, but likely enough, after just a few minutes, they

gave up the chase and went back, found their own place and went to

sleep. They were liquored-up, as I’ve said, and maybe partly funning

too.

But I didn’t know that, if they were. As I ran I kept hearing sounds,

sounds made by the rain coming down through the dead old leaves left on

the trees and by the wind blowing, and it may be that the sound that

scared me most of all was my own bare feet stepping on a dead branch and

breaking it or something like that.

There was something strange and scary, a steady sound, like a heavy man

running and breathing hard, right at my shoulder. It may have been my

own breath, coming quick and fast. And I thought I heard that chuckling

laugh I’d heard up in the loft, the laugh that sent the shivers right

down through me. Of course every tree I came close to looked like a man

standing there, ready to grab me, and I kept dodging and going—bang—into

other trees. My shoulders kept knocking against trees in that way and

the skin was all knocked off, and every time it happened I thought a big

black hand had come down and clutched at me and was tearing my flesh.

How long it went on I don’t know, maybe an hour, maybe five minutes. But

anyway the darkness didn’t let up, and the terror didn’t let up, and I

couldn’t, to save my life, scream or make any sound.

Just why I couldn’t I don’t know. Could it be because at the time I was

a woman, while at the same time I wasn’t a woman? It may be that I was

too ashamed of having turned into a girl and being afraid of a man to

make any sound. I don’t know about that. It’s over my head.

But anyway I couldn’t make a sound. I tried and tried and my throat hurt

from trying and no sound came.

And then, after a long time, or what seemed like a long time, I got out

from among the trees inside the track and was on the track itself again.

I thought the two black men were still after me, you understand, and I

ran like a madman.

Of course, running along the track that way, it must have been up the

back stretch, I came after a time to where the old slaughter-house

stood, in that field, beside the track. I knew it by its ungodly smell,

scared as I was. Then, in some way, I managed to get over the high old

fairground fence and was in the field, where the slaughter-house was.

All the time I was trying to yell or scream, or be sensible and tell

those two black men that I was a man and not a woman, but I couldn’t

make it. And then I heard a sound like a board cracking or breaking in

the fence and thought they were still after me.

So I kept on running like a crazy man, in the field, and just then I

stumbled and fell over something. I’ve told you how the old

slaughter-house field was filled with bones, that had been lying there a

long time and had all been washed white. There were heads of sheep and

cows and all kinds of things.

And when I fell and pitched forward I fell right into the midst of

something, still and cold and white.

It was probably the skeleton of a horse lying there. In small towns like

that, they take an old worn-out horse, that has died, and haul him off

to some field outside of town and skin him for the hide, that they can

sell for a dollar or two. It doesn’t make any difference what the horse

has been, that’s the way he usually ends up. Maybe even Pick-it-boy, or

O My Man, or a lot of other good fast ones I’ve seen and known have

ended that way by this time.

And so I think it was the bones of a horse lying there and he must have

been lying on his back. The birds and wild animals had picked all his

flesh away and the rain had washed his bones clean.

Anyway I fell and pitched forward and my side got cut pretty deep and my

hands clutched at something. I had fallen right in between the ribs of

the horse and they seemed to wrap themselves around me close. And my

hands, clutching upwards, had got hold of the cheeks of that dead horse

and the bones of his cheeks were cold as ice with the rain washing over

them. White bones wrapped around me and white bones in my hands.

There was a new terror now that seemed to go down to the very bottom of

me, to the bottom of the inside of me, I mean. It shook me like I have

seen a rat in a barn shaken by a dog. It was a terror like a big wave

that hits you when you are walking on a seashore, maybe. You see it

coming and you try to run and get away but when you start to run inshore

there is a stone cliff you can’t climb. So the wave comes high as a

mountain, and there it is, right in front of you and nothing in all this

world can stop it. And now it had knocked you down and rolled and

tumbled you over and over and washed you clean, clean, but dead maybe.

And that’s the way I felt—I seemed to myself dead with blind terror, it

was a feeling like the finger of God running down your back and burning

you clean, I mean.

It burned all that silly nonsense about being a girl right out of me.

I screamed at last and the spell that was on me was broken. I’ll bet the

scream I let out of me could have been heard a mile and a half.

Right away I felt better and crawled out from among the pile of bones,

and then I stood on my own feet again and I wasn’t a woman, or a young

girl any more but a man and my own self, and as far as I know I’ve been

that way ever since. Even the black night seemed warm and alive now,

like a mother might be to a kid in the dark.

Only I couldn’t go back to the race track because I was blubbering and

crying and was ashamed of myself and of what a fool I had made of

myself. Someone might see me and I couldn’t stand that, not at that

moment.

So I went across the field, walking now, not running like a crazy man,

and pretty soon I came to a fence and crawled over and got into another

field, in which there was a straw stack, I just happened to find in the

pitch darkness.

The straw stack had been there a long time and some sheep had nibbled

away at it until they had made a pretty deep hole, like a cave, in the

side of it. I found the hole and crawled in and there were some sheep in

there, about a dozen of them.

When I came in, creeping on my hands and knees, they didn’t make much

fuss, just stirred around a little and then settled down.

So I settled down amongst them too. They were warm and gentle and kind,

like Pick-it-boy, and being in there with them made me feel better than

I would have felt being with any human person I knew at that time.

So I settled down and slept after a while, and when I woke up it was

daylight and not very cold and the rain was over. The clouds were

breaking away from the sky now and maybe there would be a fair the next

week but if there was I knew I wouldn’t be there to see it.

Because what I expected to happen did happen. I had to go back across

the fields and the fairground to the place where my clothes were, right

in the broad daylight, and me stark naked, and of course I knew someone

would be up and would raise a shout, and every swipe and every driver

would stick his head out and would whoop with laughter.

And there would be a thousand questions asked, and I would be too mad

and too ashamed to answer, and would perhaps begin to blubber, and that

would make me more ashamed than ever.

It all turned out just as I expected, except that when the noise and the

shouts of laughter were going it the loudest, Burt came out of the stall

where O My Man was kept, and when he saw me he didn’t know what was the

matter but he knew something was up that wasn’t on the square and for

which I wasn’t to blame.

So he got so all-fired mad he couldn’t speak for a minute, and then he

grabbed a pitchfork and began prancing up and down before the other

stalls, giving that gang of swipes and drivers such a royal old

dressing-down as you never heard. You should have heard him sling

language. It was grand to hear.

And while he was doing it I sneaked up into the loft, blubbering because

I was so pleased and happy to hear him swear that way, and I got my wet

clothes on quick and got down, and gave Pick-it-boy a good-bye kiss on

the cheek and lit out.

The last I saw of all that part of my life was Burt, still going it, and

yelling out for the man who had put up a trick on me to come out and get

what was coming to him. He had the pitchfork in his hand and was

swinging it around, and every now and then he would make a kind of lunge

at a tree or something, he was so mad through, and there was no one else

in sight at all. And Burt didn’t even see me cutting out along the fence

through a gate and down the hill and out of the race horse and the tramp

life for the rest of my days.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

MILK BOTTLES

------------------------------------------------------------------------

MILK BOTTLES

I LIVED, during that summer, in a large room on the top floor of an old

house on the North Side in Chicago. It was August and the night was hot.

Until after midnight I sat—the sweat trickling down my back—under a

lamp, laboring to feel my way into the lives of the fanciful people who

were trying also to live in the tale on which I was at work.

It was a hopeless affair.

I became involved in the efforts of the shadowy people and they in turn

became involved in the fact of the hot uncomfortable room, in the fact

that, although it was what the farmers of the Middle West call “good

corn-growing weather” it was plain hell to be alive in Chicago. Hand in

hand the shadowy people of my fanciful world and myself groped our way

through a forest in which the leaves had all been burned off the trees.

The hot ground burned the shoes off our feet. We were striving to make

our way through the forest and into some cool beautiful city. The fact

is, as you will clearly understand, I was a little off my head.

When I gave up the struggle and got to my feet the chairs in the room

danced about. They also were running aimlessly through a burning land

and striving to reach some mythical city. “I’d better get out of here

and go for a walk or go jump into the lake and cool myself off,” I

thought.

I went down out of my room and into the street. On a lower floor of the

house lived two burlesque actresses who had just come in from their

evening’s work and who now sat in their room talking. As I reached the

street something heavy whirled past my head and broke on the stone

pavement. A white liquid spurted over my clothes and the voice of one of

the actresses could be heard coming from the one lighted room of the

house. “Oh, hell! We live such damned lives, we do, and we work in such

a town! A dog is better off! And now they are going to take booze away

from us too! I come home from working in that hot theatre on a hot night

like this and what do I see—a half-filled bottle of spoiled milk

standing on a window sill!

“I won’t stand it! I got to smash everything!” she cried.

I walked eastward from my house. From the northwestern end of the city

great hordes of men women and children had come to spend the night out

of doors, by the shore of the lake. It was stifling hot there too and

the air was heavy with a sense of struggle. On a few hundred acres of

flat land, that had formerly been a swamp, some two million people were

fighting for the peace and quiet of sleep and not getting it. Out of the

half darkness, beyond the little strip of park land at the water’s edge,

the huge empty houses of Chicago’s fashionable folk made a greyish-blue

blot against the sky. “Thank the gods,” I thought, “there are some

people who can get out of here, who can go to the mountains or the

seashore or to Europe.” I stumbled in the half darkness over the legs of

a woman who was lying and trying to sleep on the grass. A baby lay

beside her and when she sat up it began to cry. I muttered an apology

and stepped aside and as I did so my foot struck a half-filled milk

bottle and I knocked it over, the milk running out on the grass. “Oh,

I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” I cried. “Never mind,” the woman

answered, “the milk is sour.”

* * * * *

He is a tall stoop-shouldered man with prematurely greyed hair and works

as a copy writer in an advertising agency in Chicago—an agency where I

also have sometimes been employed—and on that night in August I met him,

walking with quick eager strides along the shore of the lake and past

the tired petulant people. He did not see me at first and I wondered at

the evidence of life in him when everyone else seemed half dead; but a

street lamp hanging over a nearby roadway threw its light down upon my

face and he pounced. “Here you, come up to my place,” he cried sharply.

“I’ve got something to show you. I was on my way down to see you. That’s

where I was going,” he lied as he hurried me along.

We went to his apartment on a street leading back from the lake and the

park. German, Polish, Italian and Jewish families, equipped with soiled

blankets and the ever-present half-filled bottles of milk, had come

prepared to spend the night out of doors; but the American families in

the crowd were giving up the struggle to find a cool spot and a little

stream of them trickled along the sidewalks, going back to hot beds in

the hot houses.

It was past one o’clock and my friend’s apartment was disorderly as well

as hot. He explained that his wife, with their two children, had gone

home to visit her mother on a farm near Springfield, Illinois.

We took off our coats and sat down. My friend’s thin cheeks were flushed

and his eyes shone. “You know—well—you see,” he began and then hesitated

and laughed like an embarrassed schoolboy. “Well now,” he began again,

“I’ve long been wanting to write something real, something besides

advertisements. I suppose I’m silly but that’s the way I am. It’s been

my dream to write something stirring and big. I suppose it’s the dream

of a lot of advertising writers, eh? Now look here—don’t you go

laughing. I think I’ve done it.”

He explained that he had written something concerning Chicago, the

capital and heart, as he said, of the whole Central West. He grew angry.

“People come here from the East or from farms, or from little holes of

towns like I came from and they think it smart to run Chicago into the

ground,” he declared. “I thought I’d show ’em up,” he added, jumping up

and walking nervously about the room.

He handed me many sheets of paper covered with hastily scrawled words,

but I protested and asked him to read it aloud. He did, standing with

his face turned away from me. There was a quiver in his voice. The thing

he had written concerned some mythical town I had never seen. He called

it Chicago, but in the same breath spoke of great streets flaming with

color, ghostlike buildings flung up into night skies and a river,

running down a path of gold into the boundless West. It was the city, I

told myself, I and the people of my story had been trying to find

earlier on that same evening, when because of the heat I went a little

off my head and could not work any more. The people of the city, he had

written about, were a cool-headed, brave people, marching forward to

some spiritual triumph, the promise of which was inherent in the

physical aspects of the town.

Now I am one who, by the careful cultivation of certain traits in my

character, have succeeded in building up the more brutal side of my

nature, but I cannot knock women and children down in order to get

aboard Chicago street-cars, nor can I tell an author to his face that I

think his work is rotten.

“You’re all right, Ed. You’re great. You’ve knocked out a regular

soc-dolager of a masterpiece here. Why you sound as good as Henry

Mencken writing about Chicago as the literary centre of America, and

you’ve lived in Chicago and he never did. The only thing I can see

you’ve missed is a little something about the stockyards, and you can

put that in later,” I added and prepared to depart.

“What’s this?” I asked, picking up a half-dozen sheets of paper that lay

on the floor by my chair. I read it eagerly. And when I had finished

reading it he stammered and apologized and then, stepping across the

room, jerked the sheets out of my hand and threw them out at an open

window. “I wish you hadn’t seen that. It’s something else I wrote about

Chicago,” he explained. He was flustered.

“You see the night was so hot, and, down at the office, I had to write a

condensed-milk advertisement, just as I was sneaking away to come home

and work on this other thing, and the street-car was so crowded and the

people stank so, and when I finally got home here—the wife being

gone—the place was a mess. Well, I couldn’t write and I was sore. It’s

been my chance, you see, the wife and kids being gone and the house

being quiet. I went for a walk. I think I went a little off my head.

Then I came home and wrote that stuff I’ve just thrown out of the

window.”

He grew cheerful again. “Oh, well—it’s all right. Writing that fool

thing stirred me up and enabled me to write this other stuff, this real

stuff I showed you first, about Chicago.”

And so I went home and to bed, having in this odd way stumbled upon

another bit of the kind of writing that is—for better or worse—really

presenting the lives of the people of these towns and cities—sometimes

in prose, sometimes in stirring colorful song. It was the kind of thing

Mr. Sandburg or Mr. Masters might have done after an evening’s walk on a

hot night in, say West Congress Street in Chicago.

The thing I had read of Ed’s, centred about a half-filled bottle of

spoiled milk standing dim in the moonlight on a window sill. There had

been a moon earlier on that August evening, a new moon, a thin crescent

golden streak in the sky. What had happened to my friend, the

advertising writer, was something like this—I figured it all out as I

lay sleepless in bed after our talk.

I am sure I do not know whether or not it is true that all advertising

writers and newspaper men, want to do other kinds of writing, but Ed did

all right. The August day that had preceded the hot night had been a

hard one for him to get through. All day he had been wanting to be at

home in his quiet apartment producing literature, rather than sitting in

an office and writing advertisements. In the late afternoon, when he had

thought his desk cleared for the day, the boss of the copy writers came

and ordered him to write a page advertisement for the magazines on the

subject of condensed milk. “We got a chance to get a new account if we

can knock out some crackerjack stuff in a hurry,” he said. “I’m sorry to

have to put it up to you on such a rotten hot day, Ed, but we’re up

against it. Let’s see if you’ve got some of the old pep in you. Get down

to hardpan now and knock out something snappy and unusual before you go

home.”

Ed had tried. He put away the thoughts he had been having about the city

beautiful—the glowing city of the plains—and got right down to business.

He thought about milk, milk for little children, the Chicagoans of the

future, milk that would produce a little cream to put in the coffee of

advertising writers in the morning, sweet fresh milk to keep all his

brother and sister Chicagoans robust and strong. What Ed really wanted

was a long cool drink of something with a kick in it, but he tried to

make himself think he wanted a drink of milk. He gave himself over to

thoughts of milk, milk condensed and yellow, milk warm from the cows his

father owned when he was a boy—his mind launched a little boat and he

set out on a sea of milk.

Out of it all he got what is called an original advertisement. The sea

of milk on which he sailed became a mountain of cans of condensed milk,

and out of that fancy he got his idea. He made a crude sketch for a

picture showing wide rolling green fields with white farm houses. Cows

grazed on the green hills and at one side of the picture a barefooted

boy was driving a herd of Jersey cows out of the sweet fair land and

down a lane into a kind of funnel at the small end of which was a tin of

the condensed milk. Over the picture he put a heading: “The health and

freshness of a whole countryside is condensed into one can of

Whitney-Wells Condensed Milk.” The head copy writer said it was a

humdinger.

And then Ed went home. He wanted to begin writing about the city

beautiful at once and so didn’t go out to dinner, but fished about in

the ice chest and found some cold meat out of which he made himself a

sandwich. Also, he poured himself a glass of milk, but it was sour. “Oh,

damn!” he said and poured it into the kitchen sink.

As Ed explained to me later, he sat down and tried to begin writing his

real stuff at once, but he couldn’t seem to get into it. The last hour

in the office, the trip home in the hot smelly car, and the taste of the

sour milk in his mouth had jangled his nerves. The truth is that Ed has

a rather sensitive, finely balanced nature, and it had got mussed up.

He took a walk and tried to think, but his mind wouldn’t stay where he

wanted it to. Ed is now a man of nearly forty and on that night his mind

ran back to his young manhood in the city,—and stayed there. Like other

boys who had become grown men in Chicago, he had come to the city from a

farm at the edge of a prairie town, and like all such town and farm

boys, he had come filled with vague dreams.

What things he had hungered to do and be in Chicago! What he had done

you can fancy. For one thing he had got himself married and now lived in

the apartment on the North Side. To give a real picture of his life

during the twelve or fifteen years that had slipped away since he was a

young man would involve writing a novel, and that is not my purpose.

Anyway, there he was in his room—come home from his walk—and it was hot

and quiet and he could not manage to get into his masterpiece. How still

it was in the apartment with the wife and children away! His mind stayed

on the subject of his youth in the city.

He remembered a night of his young manhood when he had gone out to walk,

just as he did on that August evening. Then his life wasn’t complicated

by the fact of the wife and children and he lived alone in his room; but

something had got on his nerves then, too. On that evening long ago he

grew restless in his room and went out to walk. It was summer and first

he went down by the river where ships were being loaded and then to a

crowded park where girls and young fellows walked about.

He grew bold and spoke to a woman who sat alone on a park bench. She let

him sit beside her and, because it was dark and she was silent, he began

to talk. The night had made him sentimental. “Human beings are such hard

things to get at. I wish I could get close to someone,” he said. “Oh,

you go on! What you doing? You ain’t trying to kid someone?” asked the

woman.

Ed jumped up and walked away. He went into a long street lined with dark

silent buildings and then stopped and looked about. What he wanted was

to believe that in the apartment buildings were people who lived intense

eager lives, who had great dreams, who were capable of great adventures.

“They are really only separated from me by the brick walls,” was what he

told himself on that night.

It was then that the milk bottle theme first got hold of him. He went

into an alleyway to look at the backs of the apartment buildings and, on

that evening also, there was a moon. Its light fell upon a long row of

half-filled bottles standing on window sills.

Something within him went a little sick and he hurried out of the

alleyway and into the street. A man and woman walked past him and

stopped before the entrance to one of the buildings. Hoping they might

be lovers, he concealed himself in the entrance to another building to

listen to their conversation.

The couple turned out to be a man and wife and they were quarreling. Ed

heard the woman’s voice saying: “You come in here. You can’t put that

over on me. You say you just want to take a walk, but I know you. You

want to go out and blow in some money. What I’d like to know is why you

don’t loosen up a little for me.”

* * * * *

That is the story of what happened to Ed, when, as a young man, he went

to walk in the city in the evening, and when he had become a man of

forty and went out of his house wanting to dream and to think of a city

beautiful, much the same sort of thing happened again. Perhaps the

writing of the condensed milk advertisement and the taste of the sour

milk he had got out of the ice box had something to do with his mood;

but, anyway, milk bottles, like a refrain in a song, got into his brain.

They seemed to sit and mock at him from the windows of all the buildings

in all the streets, and when he turned to look at people, he met the

crowds from the West and the Northwest Sides going to the park and the

lake. At the head of each little group of people marched a woman who

carried a milk bottle in her hand.

And so, on that August night, Ed went home angry and disturbed, and in

anger wrote of his city. Like the burlesque actress in my own house he

wanted to smash something, and, as milk bottles were in his mind, he

wanted to smash milk bottles. “I could grasp the neck of a milk bottle.

It fits the hand so neatly. I could kill a man or woman with such a

thing,” he thought desperately.

He wrote, you see, the five or six sheets I had read in that mood and

then felt better. And after that he wrote about the ghostlike buildings

flung into the sky by the hands of a brave adventurous people and about

the river that runs down a path of gold, and into the boundless West.

As you have already concluded, the city he described in his masterpiece

was lifeless, but the city he, in a queer way, expressed in what he

wrote about the milk bottle could not be forgotten. It frightened you a

little but there it was and in spite of his anger or perhaps because of

it, a lovely singing quality had got into the thing. In those few

scrawled pages the miracle had been worked. I was a fool not to have put

the sheets into my pocket. When I went down out of his apartment that

evening I did look for them in a dark alleyway, but they had become lost

in a sea of rubbish that had leaked over the tops of a long row of tin

ash cans that stood at the foot of a stairway leading from the back

doors of the apartments above.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE SAD HORN BLOWERS

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE SAD HORN BLOWERS

IT had been a disastrous year in Will’s family. The Appletons lived on

one of the outlying streets of Bidwell and Will’s father was a house

painter. In early February, when there was deep snow on the ground, and

a cold bitter wind blew about the houses, Will’s mother suddenly died.

He was seventeen years old then, and rather a big fellow for his age.

The mother’s death happened abruptly, without warning, as a sleepy man

kills a fly with the hand in a warm room on a summer day. On one

February day there she was coming in at the kitchen door of the

Appleton’s house, from hanging the wash out on the line in the back

yard, and warming her long hands, covered with blue veins, by holding

them over the kitchen stove—and then looking about at the children with

that half-hidden, shy smile of hers—there she was like that, as the

three children had always known her, and then, but a week later, she was

cold in death and lying in her coffin in the place vaguely spoken of in

the family as “the other room.”

After that, and when summer came and the family was trying hard to

adjust itself to the new conditions, there came another disaster. Up to

the very moment when it happened it looked as though Tom Appleton, the

house painter, was in for a prosperous season. The two boys, Fred and

Will, were to be his assistants that year.

To be sure Fred was only fifteen, but he was one to lend a quick alert

hand at almost any undertaking. For example, when there was a job of

paper hanging to be done, he was the fellow to spread on the paste,

helped by an occasional sharp word from his father.

Down off his step ladder Tom Appleton hopped and ran to the long board

where the paper was spread out. He liked this business of having two

assistants about. Well, you see, one had the feeling of being at the

head of something, of managing affairs. He grabbed the paste brush out

of Fred’s hand. “Don’t spare the paste,” he shouted. “Slap her on like

this. Spread her out—so. Do be sure to catch all the edges.”

It was all very warm, and comfortable, and nice, working at

paper-hanging jobs in the houses on the March and April days. When it

was cold or rainy outside, stoves were set up in the new houses being

built, and in houses already inhabited the folks moved out of the rooms

to be papered, spread newspapers on the floors over the carpets and put

sheets over the furniture left in the rooms. Outside it rained or

snowed, but inside it was warm and cosy.

To the Appletons it seemed, at the time, as though the death of the

mother had drawn them closer together. Both Will and Fred felt it,

perhaps Will the more consciously. The family was rather in the hole

financially—the mother’s funeral had cost a good deal of money, and Fred

was being allowed to stay out of school. That pleased him. When they

worked in a house where there were other children, they came home from

school in the late afternoon and looked in through the door to where

Fred was spreading paste over the sheets of wall paper. He made a

slapping sound with the brush, but did not look at them. “Ah, go on, you

kids,” he thought. This was a man’s business he was up to. Will and his

father were on the step ladders, putting the sheets carefully into place

on the ceilings and walls. “Does she match down there?” the father asked

sharply. “Oh-kay, go ahead,” Will replied. When the sheet was in place

Fred ran and rolled out the laps with a little wooden roller. How

jealous the kids of the house were. It would be a long time before any

of them could stay out of school and do a man’s work, as Fred was doing.

And then in the evening, walking homeward, it was nice, too. Will and

Fred had been provided with suits of white overalls that were now

covered with dried paste and spots of paint and looked really

professional. They kept them on and drew their overcoats on over them.

Their hands were stiff with paste, too. On Main Street the lights were

lighted, and other men passing called to Tom Appleton. He was called

Tony in the town. “Hello, Tony!” some storekeeper shouted. It was rather

too bad, Will thought that his father hadn’t more dignity. He was too

boyish. Young boys growing up and merging into manhood do not fancy

fathers being too boyish. Tom Appleton played a cornet in the Bidwell

Silver Cornet Band and didn’t do the job very well—rather made a mess of

it, when there was a bit of solo work to be done—but was so well liked

by the other members of the band that no one said anything. And then he

talked so grandly about music, and about the lip of a cornet player,

that everyone thought he must be all right. “He has an education. I tell

you what, Tony Appleton knows a lot. He’s a smart one,” the other

members of the band were always saying to each other.

“Well, the devil! A man should grow up after a time, perhaps. When a

man’s wife had died but such a short time before, it was just as well to

walk through Main Street with more dignity—for the time being, anyway.”

Tom Appleton had a way of winking at men he passed in the street, as

though to say, “Well, now I’ve got my kids with me, and we won’t say

anything, but didn’t you and I have the very hell of a time last

Wednesday night, eh? Mum’s the word, old pal. Keep everything quiet.

There are gay times ahead for you and me. We’ll cut loose, you bet, when

you and me are out together next time.”

Will grew a little angry about something he couldn’t exactly understand.

His father stopped in front of Jake Mann’s meat market. “You kids go

along home. Tell Kate I am bringing a steak. I’ll be right on your

heels,” he said.

He would get the steak and then he would go into Alf Geiger’s saloon and

get a good, stiff drink of whisky. There would be no one now to bother

about smelling it on his breath when he got home later. Not that his

wife had ever said anything when he wanted a drink—but you know how a

man feels when there’s a woman in the house. “Why, hello, Bildad

Smith—how’s the old game leg? Come on, have a little nip with me. Were

you on Main Street last band meeting night and did you hear us do that

new gallop? It’s a humdinger. Turkey White did that trombone solo simply

grand.”

Will and Fred had got beyond Main Street now, and Will took a small pipe

with a curved stem out of his overcoat pocket and lighted it. “I’ll bet

I could hang a ceiling without father there at all, if only some one

would give me a chance,” he said. Now that his father was no longer

present to embarrass him with his lack of dignity, he felt comfortable

and happy. Also, it was something to be able to smoke a pipe without

discomfiture. When mother was alive she was always kissing a fellow when

he came home at night, and then one had to be mighty careful about

smoking. Now it was different. One had become a man and one accepted

manhood with its responsibilities. “Don’t it make you sick at all?” Fred

asked. “Huh, naw!” Will answered contemptuously.

The new disaster to the family came late in August, just when the fall

work was all ahead, and the prospects good too. A. P. Wrigley, the

jeweler, had just built a big, new house and barn on a farm he had

bought the year before. It was a mile out of town on the Turner pike.

That would be a job to set the Appletons up for the winter. The house

was to have three coats outside, with all the work inside, and the barn

was to have two coats—and the two boys were to work with their father

and were to have regular wages.

And just to think of the work to be done inside that house made Tom

Appleton’s mouth water. He talked of it all the time, and in the

evenings liked to sit in a chair in the Appleton’s front yard, get some

neighbor over, and then go on about it. How he slung house-painter’s

lingo about! The doors and cupboards were to be grained in imitation of

weathered oak, the front door was to be curly maple, and there was to be

black walnut, too. Well, there wasn’t another painter in the town could

imitate all the various kinds of wood as Tom could. Just show him the

wood, or tell him—you didn’t have to show him anything. Name what you

wanted—that was enough. To be sure a man had to have the right tools,

but give him the tools and then just go off and leave everything to him.

What the devil! When A. P. Wrigley gave him this new house to do, he

showed he was a man who knew what he was doing.

As for the practical side of the matter, everyone in the family knew

that the Wrigley job meant a safe winter. There wasn’t any speculation,

as when taking work on the contract plan. All work was to be paid for by

the day, and the boys were to have their wages, too. It meant new suits

for the boys, a new dress and maybe a hat for Kate, the house rent paid

all winter, potatoes in the cellar. It meant safety—that was the truth.

In the evenings, sometimes, Tom got out his tools and looked at them.

Brushes and graining tools were spread out on the kitchen table, and

Kate and the boys gathered about. It was Fred’s job to see that all

brushes were kept clean and, one by one, Tom ran his fingers over them,

and then worked them back and forth over the palm of his hand. “This is

a camel’s hair,” he said, picking a soft fine-haired brush up and

handing it to Will. “I paid four dollars and eighty cents for that.”

Will also worked it back and forth over the palm of his hand, just as

his father had done and then Kate picked it up and did the same thing.

“It’s as soft as the cat’s back,” she said. Will thought that rather

silly. He looked forward to the day when he would have brushes ladders

and pots of his own, and could show them off before people and through

his mind went words he had picked up from his father’s talk. One spoke

of the “heel” and “toe” of a brush. The way to put on varnish was to

“flow” it on. Will knew all the words of his trade now and didn’t have

to talk like one of the kind of muts who just does, now and then, a jack

job of house painting.

On the fatal evening a surprise party was held for Mr. and Mrs.

Bardshare, who lived just across the road from the Appletons on Piety

Hill. That was a chance for Tom Appleton. In any such affair he liked to

have a hand in the arrangements. “Come on now, we’ll make her go with a

bang. They’ll be setting in the house after supper, and Bill Bardshare

will be in his stocking feet, and Ma Bardshare washing the dishes. They

won’t be expecting nothing, and we’ll slip up, all dressed in our Sundey

clothes, and let out a whoop. I’ll bring my cornet and let out a blast

on that too. ‘What in Sam Hill is that?’ Say, I can just see Bill

Bardshare jumping up and beginning to swear, thinking we’re a gang of

kids come to bother him, like Hallowe’en, or something like that. You

just get the grub, and I’ll make the coffee over to my house and bring

it over hot. I’ll get ahold of two big pots and make a whooping lot of

it.”

In the Appleton house all was in a flurry. Tom, Will and Fred were

painting a barn, three miles out of town, but they knocked off work at

four and Tom got the farmer’s son to drive them to town. He himself had

to wash up, take a bath in a tub in the woodshed, shave and

everything—just like Sunday. He looked more like a boy than a man when

he got all dogged up.

And then the family had to have supper, over and done with, a little

after six, and Tom didn’t dare go outside the house until dark. It

wouldn’t do to have the Bardshares see him so fixed up. It was their

wedding anniversary, and they might suspect something. He kept trotting

about the house, and occasionally looked out of the front window toward

the Bardshare house. “You kid, you,” Kate said, laughing. Sometimes she

talked up to him like that, and after she said it he went upstairs, and

getting out his cornet blew on it, so softly, you could hardly hear him

downstairs. When he did that you couldn’t tell how badly he played, as

when the band was going it on Main Street and he had to carry a passage

right through alone. He sat in the room upstairs thinking. When Kate

laughed at him it was like having his wife back, alive. There was the

same shy sarcastic gleam in her eyes.

Well, it was the first time he had been out anywhere since his wife had

died, and there might be some people think it would be better if he

stayed at home now—look better, that is. When he had shaved he had cut

his chin, and the blood had come. After a time he went downstairs and

stood before the looking-glass, hung above the kitchen sink, and dabbed

at the spot with the wet end of a towel.

Will and Fred stood about.

Will’s mind was working—perhaps Kate’s, too. “Was there—could it

be?—well, at such a party—only older people invited—there were always

two or three widow women thrown in for good measure, as it were.”

Kate didn’t want any woman fooling around her kitchen. She was twenty

years old.

“And it was just as well not to have any monkey-shine talk about

motherless children,” such as Tom might indulge in. Even Fred thought

that. There was a little wave of resent against Tom in the house. It was

a wave that didn’t make much noise, just crept, as it were softly, up a

low sandy beach.

“Widow women went to such places, and then of course, people were always

going home in couples.” Both Kate and Will had the same picture in mind.

It was late at night and in fancy they were both peeking out at front

upper windows of the Appleton house. There were all the people coming

out at the front door of the Bardshare house, and Bill Bardshare was

standing there and holding the door open. He had managed to sneak away

during the evening, and got his Sunday clothes on all right.

And the couples were coming out. “There was that woman now, that widow,

Mrs. Childers.” She had been married twice, both husbands dead now, and

she lived away over Maumee Pike way. “What makes a woman of her age want

to act silly like that? It is the very devil how a woman can keep

looking young and handsome after she has buried two men. There are some

who say that, even when her last husband was alive—”

“But whether that’s true or not, what makes her want to act and talk

silly that way?” Now her face is turned to the light and she is saying

to old Bill Bardshare, “Sleep light, sleep tight, sweet dreams to you

tonight.”

“It’s only what one may expect when one’s father lacks a sense of

dignity. There is that old fool Tom now, hopping out of the Bardshare

house like a kid, and running right up to Mrs. Childers. ‘May I see you

home?’ he is saying, while all the others are laughing and smiling

knowingly. It makes one’s blood run cold to see such a thing.”

* * * * *

“Well, fill up the pots. Let’s get the old coffee pots started, Kate.

The gang’ll be creeping along up the street pretty soon now,” Tom

shouted self-consciously, skipping busily about and breaking the little

circle of thoughts in the house.

What happened was that—just as darkness came and when all the people

were in the front yard before the Appleton house—Tom went and got it

into his head to try to carry his cornet and two big coffee pots at the

same time. Why didn’t he leave the coffee until later? There the people

were in the dusk outside the house, and there was that kind of low

whispering and tittering that always goes on at such a time—and then Tom

stuck his head out at the door and shouted, “Let her go!”

And then he must have gone quite crazy, for he ran back into the kitchen

and grabbed both of the big coffee pots, hanging on to his cornet at the

same time. Of course he stumbled in the darkness in the road outside and

fell, and of course all of that boiling hot coffee had to spill right

over him.

It was terrible. The flood of boiling hot coffee made steam under his

thick clothes, and there he lay screaming with the pain of it. What a

confusion! He just writhed and screamed, and the people ran ’round and

’round in the half darkness like crazy things. Was it some kind of joke

the crazy fellow was up to at the last minute! Tom always was such a

devil to think up things. “You should see him down at Alf Geigers,

sometimes on Saturday nights, imitating the way Joe Douglas got out on a

limb, and then sawed it off between himself and the tree, and the look

on Joe’s face when the limb began to crack. It would make you laugh

until you screamed to see him imitate that.”

“But what now? My God!” There was Kate Appleton trying to tear her

father’s clothes off, and crying and whimpering, and young Will Appleton

knocking people aside. “Say, the man’s hurt! What’s happened? My God!

Run for the doctor, someone. He’s burnt, something awful!”

* * * * *

Early in October Will Appleton sat in the smoking car of a day train

that runs between Cleveland and Buffalo. His destination was Erie,

Pennsylvania, and he had got on the passenger train at Ashtabula, Ohio.

Just why his destination was Erie he couldn’t very easily have

explained. He was going there anyway, going to get a job in a factory or

on the docks there. Perhaps it was just a quirk of the mind that had

made him decide upon Erie. It wasn’t as big as Cleveland or Buffalo or

Toledo or Chicago, or any one of a lot of other cities to which he might

have gone, looking for work.

At Ashtabula he came into the car and slid into a seat beside a little

old man. His own clothes were wet and wrinkled, and his hair, eyebrows

and ears were black with coal dust.

At the moment, there was in him a kind of bitter dislike of his native

town, Bidwell. “Sakes alive, a man couldn’t get any work there—not in

the winter.” After the accident to his father, and the spoiling of all

the family plans, he had managed to find employment during September on

the farms. He worked for a time with a threshing crew, and then got work

cutting corn. It was all right. “A man made a dollar a day and board,

and as he wore overalls all the time, he didn’t wear out no clothes.

Still and all, the time when a fellow could make any money in Bidwell

was past now, and the burns on his father’s body had gone pretty deep,

and he might be laid up for months.”

Will had just made up his mind one day, after he had tramped about all

morning from farm to farm without finding work, and then he had gone

home and told Kate. “Dang it all,” he hadn’t intended lighting out right

away—had thought he would stay about for a week or two, maybe. Well, he

would go up town in the evening, dressed up in his best clothes, and

stand around. “Hello, Harry, what you going to do this winter? I thought

I would run over to Erie, Pennsylvania. I got an offer in a factory over

there. Well, so long—if I don’t see you again.”

Kate hadn’t seemed to understand, had seemed in an almighty hurry about

getting him off. It was a shame she couldn’t have a little more heart.

Still, Kate was all right—worried a good deal no doubt. After their talk

she had just said, “Yes, I think that’s best, you had better go,” and

had gone to change the bandages on Tom’s legs and back. The father was

sitting among pillows in a rocking chair in the front room.

Will went up stairs and put his things, overalls and a few shirts, into

a bundle. Then he went down stairs and took a walk—went out along a road

that led into the country, and stopped on a bridge. It was near a place

where he and other kids used to come swimming on summer afternoons. A

thought had come into his head. There was a young fellow worked in

Pawsey’s jewelry store came to see Kate sometimes on Sunday evenings and

they went off to walk together. “Did Kate want to get married?” If she

did his going away now might be for good. He hadn’t thought about that

before. On that afternoon, and quite suddenly, all the world outside of

Bidwell seemed huge and terrible to him and a few secret tears came into

his eyes, but he managed to choke them back. For just a moment his mouth

opened and closed queerly, like the mouth of a fish, when you take it

out of the water and hold it in your hand.

When he returned to the house at supper time things were better. He had

left his bundle on a chair in the kitchen and Kate had wrapped it more

carefully, and had put in a number of things he had forgotten. His

father called him into the front room. “It’s all right, Will. Every

young fellow ought to take a whirl out in the world. I did it myself, at

about your age,” Tom had said, a little pompously.

Then supper was served, and there was apple pie. That was a luxury the

Appletons had perhaps better not have indulged in at that time, but Will

knew Kate had baked it during the afternoon,—it might be as a way of

showing him how she felt. Eating two large slices had rather set him up.

And then, before he realized how the time was slipping away, ten o’clock

had come, and it was time for him to go. He was going to beat his way

out of town on a freight train, and there was a local going toward

Cleveland at ten o’clock. Fred had gone off to bed, and his father was

asleep in the rocking chair in the front room. He had picked up his

bundle, and Kate had put on her hat. “I’m going to see you off,” she had

said.

Will and Kate had walked in silence along the streets to where he was to

wait, in the shadow of Whaley’s Warehouse, until the freight came along.

Later when he thought back over that evening he was glad, that although

she was three years older, he was taller than Kate.

How vividly everything that happened later stayed in his mind. After the

train came, and he had crawled into an empty coal car, he sat hunched up

in a corner. Overhead he could see the sky, and when the train stopped

at towns there was always the chance the car in which he was concealed

would be shoved into a siding, and left. The brakemen walked along the

tracks beside the car shouting to each other and their lanterns made

little splashes of light in the darkness.

“How black the sky!” After a time it began to rain. “His suit would be

in a pretty mess. After all a fellow couldn’t come right out and ask his

sister if she intended to marry. If Kate married, then his father would

also marry again. It was all right for a young woman like Kate, but for

a man of forty to think of marriage—the devil! Why didn’t Tom Appleton

have more dignity? After all, Fred was only a kid and a new woman coming

in, to be his mother—that might be all right for a kid.”

All during that night on the freight train Will had thought a good deal

about marriage—rather vague thoughts—coming and going like birds flying

in and out of a bush. It was all a matter—this business of man and

woman—that did not touch him very closely—not yet. The matter of having

a home—that was something else. A home was something at a fellow’s back.

When one went off to work all week at some farm, and at night maybe went

into a strange room to sleep, there was always the Appleton

house—floating as it were, like a picture at the back of the mind—the

Appleton house, and Kate moving about. She had been up town, and now had

come home and was going up the stairs. Tom Appleton was fussing about in

the kitchen. He liked a bite before he went off to bed for the night but

presently he would go up stairs and into his own room. He liked to smoke

his pipe before he slept and sometimes he got out his cornet and blew

two or three soft sad notes.

* * * * *

At Cleveland Will had crawled off of the freight train and had gone

across the city in a street-car. Workingmen were just going to the

factories and he passed among them unnoticed. If his clothes were

crumpled and soiled, their clothes weren’t so fine. The workingmen were

all silent, looking at the car floor, or out at the car windows. Long

rows of factories stood along the streets through which the car moved.

He had been lucky, and had caught another freight out of a place called

Collinswood at eight, but at Ashtabula had made up his mind it would be

better to drop off the freight and take a passenger train. If he was to

live in Erie it would be just as well to arrive, looking more like a

gentleman and having paid his fare.

* * * * *

As he sat in the smoking car of the train he did not feel much like a

gentleman. The coal dust had got into his hair and the rain had washed

it in long dirty streaks down over his face. His clothes were badly

soiled and wanted cleaning and brushing and the paper package, in which

his overalls and shirts were tied, had become torn and dirty.

Outside the train window the sky was grey, and no doubt the night was

going to turn cold. Perhaps there would be a cold rain.

It was an odd thing about the towns through which the train kept

passing—all of the houses in all the towns looked cold and forbidding.

“Dang it all.” In Bidwell, before the night when his father got so badly

burned being such a fool about old Bill Bardshare’s party—all the houses

had always seemed warm cozy places. When one was alone, one walked along

the streets whistling. At night warm lights shone through the windows of

the houses. “John Wyatt, the drayman, lives in that house. His wife has

a wen on her neck. In that barn over there old Doctor Musgrave keeps his

bony old white horse. The horse looks like the devil, but you bet he can

go.”

* * * * *

Will squirmed about on the car seat. The old man who sat beside him was

small, almost as small as Fred, and he wore a queer-looking suit. The

pants were brown, and the coat checked, grey and black. There was a

small leather case on the floor at his feet.

Long before the man spoke Will knew what would happen. It was bound to

turn out that such a fellow played a cornet. He was a man, old in years,

but there was no dignity in him. Will remembered his father’s marchings

through the main street of Bidwell with the band. It was some great day,

Fourth of July, perhaps, and all the people were assembled and there was

Tony Appleton, making a show of blowing his cornet at a great rate. Did

all the people along the street know how badly he played and was there a

kind of conspiracy, that kept grown men from laughing at each other? In

spite of the seriousness of his own situation a smile crept over Will’s

face.

The little man at his side smiled in return.

“Well,” he began, not stopping for anything but plunging headlong into a

tale concerning some dissatisfaction he felt with life, “well, you see

before you a man who is up against it, young fellow.” The old man tried

to laugh at his own words, but did not make much of a success of it. His

lip trembled. “I got to go home like a dog, with my tail ’twixt my

legs,” he declared abruptly.

The old man balanced back and forth between two impulses. He had met a

young man on a train, and hungered for companionship and one got oneself

in with others by being jolly, a little gay perhaps. When one met a

stranger on a train one told a story—“By the way, Mister, I heard a new

one the other day—perhaps you haven’t heard it? It’s about the miner up

in Alaska who hadn’t seen a woman for years.” One began in that way, and

then later perhaps, spoke of oneself, and one’s affairs.

But the old man wanted to plunge at once into his own story. He talked,

saying sad discouraged words, while his eyes kept smiling with a

peculiar appealing little smile. “If the words uttered by my lips annoy

or bore you, do not pay any attention to them. I am really a jolly

fellow although I am an old man, and not of much use any more,” the eyes

were saying. The eyes were pale blue and watery. How strange to see them

set in the head of an old man. They belonged in the head of a lost dog.

The smile was not really a smile. “Don’t kick me, young fellow. If you

can’t give me anything to eat, scratch my head. At least show you are a

fellow of good intentions. I’ve been kicked about quite enough.” It was

so very evident the eyes were speaking a language of their own.

Will found himself smiling sympathetically. It was true there was

something dog-like in the little old man and Will was pleased with

himself for having so quickly caught the sense of him. “One who can see

things with his eyes will perhaps get along all right in the world,

after all,” he thought. His thoughts wandered away from the old man. In

Bidwell there was an old woman lived alone and owned a shepherd dog.

Every summer she decided to cut away the dog’s coat, and then—at the

last moment and after she had in fact started the job—she changed her

mind. Well, she grasped a long pair of scissors firmly in her hand and

started on the dog’s flanks. Her hand trembled a little. “Shall I go

ahead, or shall I stop?” After two minutes she gave up the job. “It

makes him look too ugly,” she thought, justifying her timidity.

Later the hot days came, the dog went about with his tongue hanging out

and again the old woman took the scissors in her hand. The dog stood

patiently waiting but, when she had cut a long wide furrow through the

thick hair of his back, she stopped again. In a sense, and to her way of

looking at the matter, cutting away his splendid coat was like cutting

away a part of himself. She couldn’t go on. “Now there—that made him

look worse than ever,” she declared to herself. With a determined air

she put the scissors away, and all summer the dog went about looking a

little puzzled and ashamed.

Will kept smiling and thinking of the old woman’s dog and then looked

again at his companion of the train. The variegated suit the old man

wore gave him something of the air of the half-sheared shepherd dog.

Both had the same puzzled, ashamed air.

Now Will had begun using the old man for his own ends. There was

something inside himself that wanted facing, he didn’t want to face—not

yet. Ever since he had left home, in fact ever since that day when he

had come home from the country and had told Kate of his intention to set

out into the world, he had been dodging something. If one thought of the

little old man, and of the half-sheared dog, one did not have to think

of oneself.

One thought of Bidwell on a summer afternoon. There was the old woman,

who owned the dog, standing on the porch of her house, and the dog had

run down to the gate. In the winter, when his coat had again fully

grown, the dog would bark and make a great fuss about a boy passing in

the street but now he started to bark and growl, and then stopped. “I

look like the devil, and I’m attracting unnecessary attention to

myself,” the dog seemed to have decided suddenly. He ran furiously down

to the gate, opened his mouth to bark, and then, quite abruptly, changed

his mind and trotted back to the house with his tail between his legs.

Will kept smiling at his own thoughts. For the first time since he had

left Bidwell he felt quite cheerful.

And now the old man was telling a story of himself and his life, but

Will wasn’t listening. Within the young man a cross-current of impulses

had been set up and he was like one standing silently in the hallway of

a house, and listening to two voices, talking at a distance. The voices

came from two widely separated rooms of the house and one couldn’t make

up one’s mind to which voice to listen.

To be sure the old man was another cornet player like his father—he was

a horn blower. That was his horn in the little worn leather case on the

car floor.

And after he had reached middle age, and after his first wife had died,

he had married again. He had a little property then and, in a foolish

moment, went and made it all over to his second wife, who was fifteen

years younger than himself. She took the money and bought a large house

in the factory district of Erie, and then began taking in boarders.

There was the old man, feeling lost, of no account in his own house. It

just came about. One had to think of the boarders—their wants had to be

satisfied. His wife had two sons, almost fully grown now, both of whom

worked in a factory.

Well, it was all right—everything on the square—the sons paid board all

right. Their wants had to be thought of, too. He liked blowing his

cornet a while in the evenings, before he went to bed, but it might

disturb the others in the house. One got rather desperate going about

saying nothing, keeping out of the way and he had tried getting work in

a factory himself, but they wouldn’t have him. His grey hairs stood in

his way, and so one night he had just got out, had gone to Cleveland,

where he had hoped to get a job in a band, in a movie theatre perhaps.

Anyway it hadn’t turned out and now he was going back to Erie and to his

wife. He had written and she had told him to come on home.

“They didn’t turn me down back there in Cleveland because I’m old. It’s

because my lip is no good any more,” he explained. His shrunken old lip

trembled a little.

Will kept thinking of the old woman’s dog. In spite of himself, and when

the old man’s lip trembled, his lip also trembled.

What was the matter with him?

He stood in the hallway of a house hearing two voices. Was he trying to

close his ears to one of them? Did the second voice, the one he had been

trying all day, and all the night before, not to hear, did that have

something to do with the end of his life in the Appleton house at

Bidwell? Was the voice trying to taunt him, trying to tell him that now

he was a thing swinging in air, that there was no place to put down his

feet? Was he afraid? Of what was he afraid? He had wanted so much to be

a man, to stand on his own feet and now what was the matter with him?

Was he afraid of manhood?

He was fighting desperately now. There were tears in the old man’s eyes,

and Will also began crying silently and that was the one thing he felt

he must not do.

The old man talked on and on, telling the tale of his troubles, but Will

could not hear his words. The struggle within was becoming more and more

definite. His mind clung to the life of his boyhood, to the life in the

Appleton house in Bidwell.

There was Fred, standing in the field of his fancy now, with just the

triumphant look in his eyes that came when other boys saw him doing a

man’s work. A whole series of pictures floated up before Will’s mind. He

and his father and Fred were painting a barn and two farmer boys had

come along a road and stood looking at Fred, who was on a ladder,

putting on paint. They shouted, but Fred wouldn’t answer. There was a

certain air Fred had—he slapped on the paint, and then turning his head,

spat on the ground. Tom Appleton’s eyes looked into Will’s and there was

a smile playing about the corners of the father’s eyes and the son’s

eyes too. The father and his oldest son were like two men, two workmen,

having a delicious little secret between them. They were both looking

lovingly at Fred. “Bless him! He thinks he’s a man already.”

And now Tom Appleton was standing in the kitchen of his house, and his

brushes were laid out on the kitchen table. Kate was rubbing a brush

back and forth over the palm of her hand. “It’s as soft as the cat’s

back,” she was saying.

Something gripped at Will’s throat. As in a dream, he saw his sister

Kate walking off along the street on Sunday evening with that young

fellow who clerked in the jewelry store. They were going to church. Her

being with him meant—well, it perhaps meant the beginning of a new

home—it meant the end of the Appleton home.

Will started to climb out of the seat beside the old man in the smoking

car of the train. It had grown almost dark in the car. The old man was

still talking, telling his tale over and over. “I might as well not have

any home at all,” he was saying. Was Will about to begin crying aloud on

a train, in a strange place, before many strange men. He tried to speak,

to make some commonplace remark, but his mouth only opened and closed

like the mouth of a fish taken out of the water.

And now the train had run into a train shed, and it was quite dark.

Will’s hand clutched convulsively into the darkness and alighted upon

the old man’s shoulder.

Then suddenly, the train had stopped, and the two stood half embracing

each other. The tears were quite evident in Will’s eyes, when a brakeman

lighted the overhead lamps in the car, but the luckiest thing in the

world had happened. The old man, who had seen Will’s tears, thought they

were tears of sympathy for his own unfortunate position in life and a

look of gratitude came into his blue watery eyes. Well, this was

something new in life for him, too. In one of the pauses, when he had

first begun telling his tale, Will had said he was going to Erie to try

to get work in some factory and now, as they got off the train, the old

man clung to Will’s arm. “You might as well come live at our house,” he

said. A look of hope flared up in the old man’s eyes. If he could bring

home with him, to his young wife, a new boarder, the gloom of his own

home-coming would be somewhat lightened. “You come on. That’s the best

thing to do. You just come on with me to our house,” he plead, clinging

to Will.

* * * * *

Two weeks had passed and Will had, outwardly, and to the eyes of the

people about him, settled into his new life as a factory hand at Erie,

Pennsylvania.

Then suddenly, on a Saturday evening, the thing happened that he had

unconsciously been expecting and dreading ever since the moment when he

climbed aboard the freight train in the shadow of Whaley’s Warehouse at

Bidwell. A letter, containing great news, had come from Kate.

At the moment of their parting, and before he settled himself down out

of sight in a corner of the empty coal car, on that night of his

leaving, he had leaned out for a last look at his sister. She had been

standing silently in the shadows of the warehouse, but just as the train

was about to start, stepped toward him and a light from a distant street

lamp fell on her face.

Well, the face did not jump toward Will, but remained dimly outlined in

the uncertain light.

Did her lips open and close, as though in an effort to say something to

him, or was that an effect produced by the distant, uncertain and

wavering light? In the families of working people the dramatic and vital

moments of life are passed over in silence. Even in the moments of death

and birth, little is said. A child is born to a laborer’s wife and he

goes into the room. She is in bed with the little red bundle of new life

beside her and her husband stands a moment, fumblingly, beside the bed.

Neither he or his wife can look directly into each other’s eyes. “Take

care of yourself, Ma. Have a good rest,” he says, and hurries out of the

room.

In the darkness by the warehouse at Bidwell Kate had taken two or three

steps toward Will, and then had stopped. There was a little strip of

grass between the warehouse and the tracks, and she stood upon it. Was

there a more final farewell trembling on her lips at the moment? A kind

of dread had swept over Will, and no doubt Kate had felt the same thing.

At the moment she had become altogether the mother, in the presence of

her child, and the thing within that wanted utterance became submerged.

There was a word to be said that she could not say. Her form seemed to

sway a little in the darkness and, to Will’s eyes, she became a slender

indistinct thing. “Goodbye,” he had whispered into the darkness, and

perhaps her lips had formed the same words. Outwardly there had been

only the silence, and in the silence she had stood as the train rumbled

away.