THE HEAVY HAND OF FATE.
Garrison left Long Island for New York that night. When you are hard
hit the soul suffers a reflex-action. It recoils to its native soil.
New York was Garrison's home. He was a product of its sporting soil.
He loved the Great White Way. But he had drunk in the smell, the
intoxication of the track with his mother's milk. She had been from
the South; the land of straight women, straight men, straight living,
straight riding. She had brought blood--good, clean blood--to the
Garrison-Loring entente cordiale--a polite definition of a huge mistake.
From his mother Garrison had inherited his cool head, steady eye, and
the intuitive hands that could compel horse-flesh like a magnet. From
her he had inherited a peculiar recklessness and swift daring. From his
father--well, Garrison never liked to talk about his father. His mother
was a memory; his father a blank. He was a good-looking, bad-living
sprig of a straight family-tree. He had met his wife at the New Orleans
track, where her father, an amateur horse-owner, had two entries.
And she had loved him. There is good in every one. Perhaps she had
discovered it in Garrison's father where no one else had.
Her family threw her off--at least, when she came North with her
husband, she gradually dropped out of her home circle; dropped of
her own volition. Perhaps she was afraid that the good she had first
discovered in her husband had been seen through a magnifying-glass.
Her life with Garrison was a constant whirlwind of changing scene and
fortune--the perpetual merry--or sorry--go-round of a book-maker; going
from track to track, and from bad to worse. His friends said he was
unlucky; his enemies, that the only honest thing in him was his cough.
He had incipient consumption. So Mrs. Garrison's life, such as it was,
had been lived in a trunk--when it wasn't held for hotel bills--but she
had lived out her mistake gamely.
When the boy came--Billy--she thought Heaven had smiled upon her at
last. But it was only hell. Garrison loved his wife, for love is not a
quality possessed only by the virtuous. Sometimes the worst man can
love the most--in his selfish way. And Garrison resented the arrival of
Billy. He resented sharing his wife's affection with the boy.
In time he came to hate his son. Billy's education was chiefly
constitutional. There wasn't the money to pay for his education for any
length of time. His mother had to fight for it piecemeal. So he took
his education in capsules; receiving a dose in one city and jumping to
another for the next, according as a track opened.
He knew his father never cared for him, though his mother tried her best
to gloze over the indifference of her husband. But Billy understood
and resented it. He and his mother loved in secret. When she died, her
mistake lived out to the best of her ability, young Garrison promptly
ran away from his circulating home. He knew nothing of his father's
people; nothing of his mother's. He was a young derelict; his inherent
sense of honor and an instinctive desire for cleanliness kept him off
the rocks.
The years between the time he left home and the period when he won his
first mount on the track, his natural birthright, Billy Garrison often
told himself he would never care to look back upon. He was young, and
he did not know that years of privation, of hardship, of
semi-starvation--but with an insistent ambition goading one on--are not
years to eliminate in retrospect. They are years to reverence.
He did not know that prosperity, not adversity, is the supreme test. And
when the supreme test came; when the goal was attained, and the golden
sun of wealth, fame, and honor beamed down upon him, little Billy
Garrison was found wanting. He was swamped by the flood. He went the way
of many a better, older, wiser man--the easy, rose-strewn way, big and
broad and scented, that ends in a bottomless abyss filled with bitter
tears and nauseating regrets; the abyss called, “It might have been.”
Where he had formerly shunned vice by reason of adversity and poverty
making it appear so naked, revolting, unclean, foreign to his state,
prosperity had now decked it out in her most sensuous, alluring
garments. Red's moral diatribe had been correct. Garrison had followed
the band-wagon to the finish, never asking where it might lead; never
caring. He had youth, reputation, money--he could never overdraw that
account. And so the modern pied piper played, and little Garrison
blindly danced to the music with the other fools; danced on and on until
he was swallowed up in the mountain.
Then he awoke too late, as they all awake; awoke to find that his vigor
had been sapped by early suppers and late breakfasts; his finances
depleted by slow horses and fast women; his nerve frayed to ribbons by
gambling. And then had come that awful morning when he first commenced
to cough. Would he, could he, ever forget it?
Billy Garrison huddled down now in the roaring train as he thought of
it. It was always before him, a demoniacal obsession--that morning when
he coughed, and a bright speck of arterial blood stood out like a tardy
danger-signal against the white of his handkerchief; it was leering at
him, saying: “I have been here always, but you have chosen to be blind.”
Consumption--the jockey's Old Man of the Sea--had arrived at last. He
had inherited the seeds from his father; he had assiduously cultivated
them by making weight against all laws of nature; by living against laws
of God and man. Now they had been punished as they always are. Nature
had struck, struck hard.
That had been the first warning, and Garrison did not heed it. Instead
of quitting the game, taking what little assets he had managed to save
from the holocaust, and living quietly, striving for a cure, he kicked
over the traces. The music of the pied piper was still in his ears;
twisting his brain. He gritted his teeth. He would not give in. He would
show that he was master. He would fight this insidious vitality vampire;
fight and conquer.
Besides, he had to make money. The thought of going back to a pittance a
year sickened him. That pittance had once been a fortune to him. But his
appetite had not been gorged, satiated; rather, it had the resilience of
crass youth; jumping the higher with every indulgence. It increased
in ratio with his income. He had no one to guide him; no one to compel
advice with a whip, if necessary. He knew it all. So he kept his curse
secret. He would pile up one more fortune, retain it this time, and
then retire. But nature had balked. The account--youth, reputation,
money--was overthrown at last.
Came a day when in the paddock Dan Crimmins had seen that fleck of
arterial blood on the handkerchief. Then Dan shared the secret. He
commenced to doctor Garrison. Before every race the jockey had a drug.
But despite it he rode worse than an exercise-boy; rode despicably. The
Carter Handicap had finished his deal. And with it Garrison had lost his
reputation.
He had done many things in his mad years of prosperity--the mistakes,
the faults of youth. But Billy Garrison was right when he said he was
square. He never threw a race in his life. Horseflesh, the “game,” was
sacred to him. He had gone wild, but never crooked. But the world now
said otherwise, and it is only the knave, the saint, and the fool who
never heed what the world says.
And so at twenty-two, when the average young man is leaving college for
the real taste of life, little Garrison had drained it to the dregs; the
lees tasted bitter in his mouth.
For obvious reasons Garrison had not chosen his usual haven, the
smoking-car, on the train. It was filled to overflowing from the
Aqueduct track, and he knew that his name would be mentioned frequently
and in no complimentary manner. His soul had been stripped bare,
sensitive to a breath. It would writhe under the mild compassion of a
former admirer as much as it would under the open jibes of his enemies.
He had plenty of enemies. Every “is,” “has-been,” “would-be,” “will-be”
has enemies. It is well they have. Nothing is lost in nature. Enemies
make you; not your friends.
Garrison had selected a car next to the smoker and occupied a seat at
the forward end, his back to the engine. His hands were deep in his
pockets, his shoulders hunched, his eyes staring straight ahead under
the brim of his slouch-hat. His eyes were looking inward, not outward;
they did not see his surroundings; they were looking in on the ruin of
his life.
The present, the future, did not exist; only the past lived--lived with
all the animalism of a rank growth. He was too far in the depths to even
think of reerecting his life's structure. His cough was troubling him;
his brain throbbing, throbbing.
Then, imperceptibly, as Garrison's staring, blank eyes slowly turned
from within to without, occasioned by a violent jolt of the train,
something flashed across their retina; they became focused, and a
message was wired to his brain. Instantly his eyes dropped, and he
fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat.
He found he had been staring into a pair of slate-gray eyes; staring
long, rudely, without knowing it. Their owner was occupying a seat three
removed down the aisle. As he was seated with his back to the engine, he
was thus confronting them.
She was a young girl with indefinite hair, white skin coated with tan,
and a very steady gaze. She would always be remembered for her eyes.
Garrison instantly decided that they were beautiful. He furtively peered
up from under his hat. She was still looking at him fixedly without the
slightest embarrassment.
Garrison was not susceptible to the eternal feminine. He was old with a
boy's face. Yet he found himself taking snap-shots at the girl opposite.
She was reading now. Unwittingly he tried to criticize every feature. He
could not. It was true that they were far from being regular; her nose
went up like her short upper lip; her chin and under lip said that she
had a temper and a will of her own. He noted also that she had a
mole under her left eye. But one always returned from the facial
peregrinations to her eyes. After a long stare Garrison caught himself
wishing that he could kiss those eyes. That threw him into a panic.
“Be sad, be sad,” he advised himself gruffly. “What right have you to
think? You're rude to stare, even if she is a queen. She wouldn't wipe
her boots on you.”
Having convinced himself that he should not think, Garrison promptly
proceeded to speculate. How tall was she? He likened her flexible figure
to Sis. Sis was his criterion. Then, for the brain is a queer actor,
playing clown when it should play tragedian, Garrison discovered that
he was wishing that the girl would not be taller than his own five feet
two.
“As if it mattered a curse,” he laughed contemptuously.
His eyes were transferred to the door. It had opened, and with the puff
of following wind there came a crowd of men, emerging like specters from
the blue haze of the smoker. They had evidently been “smoked out.” Some
of them were sober.
Garrison half-lowered his head as the crowd entered. He did not wish to
be recognized. The men, laughing noisily, crowded into what seats were
unoccupied. There was one man more than the available space, and
he started to occupy the half-vacant seat beside the girl with the
slate-colored eyes. He was slightly more than fat, and the process of
making four feet go into two was well under way when the girl spoke.
“Pardon me, this seat is reserved.”
“Don't look like it,” said Behemoth.
“But I say it is. Isn't that enough?”
“Full house; no reserved seats,” observed the man placidly, squeezing
in.
The girl flashed a look at him and then was silent. A spot of red was
showing through the tan on her cheek; Garrison was watching her under
his hat-brim. He saw the spot on her cheeks slowly grow and her eyes
commence to harden. He saw that she was being annoyed surreptitiously
and quietly. Behemoth was a Strephon, and he thought that he had found
his Chloe.
Garrison pulled his hat well down over his face, rose negligently, and
entered the next car. He waited there a moment and then returned. He
swung down the aisle. As he approached the girl he saw her draw back.
Strephon's foot was deliberately pressing Chloe's.
Garrison avoided a scene for the girl's sake. He tapped the man on the
shoulder.
“Pardon me. My seat, if you please. I left it for the smoker.”
The man looked up, met Garrison's cold, steady eyes, rose awkwardly,
muttered something about not knowing it was reserved, and squeezed in
with two of his companions farther down the aisle.
Garrison sat down without glancing at the girl. He became absorbed in
the morning paper--twelve hours old.
Silence ensued. The girl had understood the fabrication instantly. She
waited, her antagonism roused, to see whether Garrison would try to
take advantage of his courtesy. When he was entirely oblivious of her
presence she commenced to inspect him covertly out of the corners of her
gray eyes. After five minutes she spoke.
“Thank you,” she said simply. Her voice was soft and throaty.
Garrison absently raised his hat and was about to resume the defunct
paper when he was interrupted. A hand reached over the back of the seat,
and before he had thought of resistance, he was flung violently down the
aisle.
He heard a great laugh from the Behemoth's friends. He rose slowly, his
fighting blood up. Then he became aware that his ejector was not one of
the crowd, but a newcomer; a tall man with a fierce white mustache and
imperial; dressed in a frock coat and wide, black slouch hat. He was
talking.
“How dare you insult my daughter, suh?” he thundered. “By thunder,
suh, I've a good mind to make you smart right proper for your lack of
manners, suh! How dare you, suh? You--you contemptible little--little
snail, suh! Snail, suh!” And quite satisfied at thus selecting the
most fitting word, glaring fiercely and twisting his white mustache and
imperial with a very martial air, he seated himself majestically by his
daughter.
Garrison recognized him. He was Colonel Desha, of Kentucky, whose horse,
Rogue, had won the Carter Handicap through Garrison's poor riding of the
favorite, Sis. His daughter was expostulating with him, trying to insert
the true version of the affair between her father's peppery exclamations
of “Occupying my seat!” “I saw him raise his hat to you!” “How dare he?”
“Complain to the management against these outrageous flirts!” “Abominable
manners!” etc., etc.
Meanwhile Garrison had silently walked into the smoker. He tried to
dismiss the incident from his mind, but it stuck; stuck as did the
girl's eyes.
At the next station a newsboy entered the car. Garrison idly bought a
paper. It was full of the Carter Handicap, giving both Crimmins' and
Waterbury's version of the affair. Public opinion, it seemed, was with
them. They had protested the race. It had been thrown, and Garrison's
dishonor now was national.
There was a column of double-leaded type on the first page, run in
after the making up of the paper's body, and Garrison's bitter eyes
negligently scanned it. But at the first word he straightened up as if
an electric shock had passed through him.
“Favorite for the Carter Handicap Poisoned,” was the great, staring
title. The details were meager; brutally meager. They were to the effect
that some one had gained access to the Waterbury stable and had fed Sis
strychnine.
Garrison crumpled up the paper and buried his face in his hands, making
no pretense of hiding his misery. She had been more than a horse to him;
she had been everything.
“Sis--Sis,” he whispered over and over again, the tears burning to his
eyes, his throat choking: “I didn't get a chance to square the deal.
Sis--Sis it was good-by--good-by forever.”