ONE who like myself could not, because of circumstances, spend the
years of his youth in the schools must of necessity turn to books and
to the men and women directly about him; upon these he must depend for
his knowledge of life and to these I had turned. What a life the people
of the books led! They were for the most part such respectable people,
with problems I did not have at all or they were such keen and brainy
villains as I could never hope to become. Being a Nero a Jesse James or
a Napoleon I often thought would suit me first rate but I could not see
how I was going to make it. In the first place I never could shoot very
well, I hadn’t the courage to kill people I did not like and to steal
on any grand scale involved the risk of prison--or at least I then
thought it did. I later found that only petty thieves were in danger
but at that time, long before I myself became a schemer in business,
I knew only petty thieves. At the race tracks some of my friends were
always being marched off to prison or I heard of some man I had known
being nabbed and taken away and prisons frightened me. I remembered
vividly a night of my boyhood and myself going through an alleyway
and past our town jail and the white face of a man staring out at me
from behind iron bars. “Hey kid, get me an iron bar or a hammer and
pass it up here to me and I’ll give you a quarter,” he said in harsh
throaty tones but I was frightened at the sight of his white drawn
face in the moonlight and at the thoughts of the grim silent place in
which he stood. A murderer, a crazed farmer who had killed his wife and
hired man with an ax, had once been lodged in the jail and I had got
the notion into my head that all men who passed into its doors were
terrible and dangerous. I ran quickly away and got out of the alleyway
into a lighted street and always afterward I remembered that moment,
the stars in the sky, the moonlight shining on the faces of buildings,
the quick sharp laughter of a girl somewhere in the darkness on the
porch of a house, the sound of a horse’s hoofs in a roadway, all the
sweet sounds of free men and women walking about. I wanted to spend my
life walking about and looking at things, listening to words, to the
sound of winds blowing through trees, smelling life sweet and alive,
not put away somewhere in a dark ill-smelling place. Once later when I
was working at Columbus, Ohio, I went with a fellow--he had a sickening
kind of curiosity about such places and kept urging and urging--to the
state prison on visiting day. It was at the hour when the prisoners
take exercise and many of them were in a large open place between high
walls, on which guards with guns walked up and down. I looked once and
then closed my eyes and during the rest of our pilgrimage through the
place I carefully avoided looking into the prisoners’ faces or into
the cells before which we stopped but looked down instead at the stone
floors until we were again outside in the sunlight.
As I have said the books were mostly about respectable people with
moral problems, with family fortunes that must be saved or built up,
daughters safely married, hints at a possible loss of virtue on the
part of some woman and the terrible consequences that were to follow.
In the books the women who grew familiar with men, to whom they were
not married, were always having children and thus giving themselves
away to all and I did not know any such women. The kind of women among
whom life at that time threw me were much wiser and pretty much seemed
to have children or not as they chose and I presume I thought the other
kind must be a rather foolish sort and not worth bothering or thinking
about.
And then there was the grand life in the big world, the life of the
courts, the field, camp and palace, and in the America of Newport,
Boston and New York. It was all a life far away from me but it seemed
to occupy the attention of most of the novelists. As for myself I did
not think at that time that I would ever see much of such life and I am
afraid it did not much tempt me.
However, I read greedily everything that came into my hands. Laura
Jean Libbey, Walter Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Fielding,
Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Balzac, the Bible, Stephen Crane, dime
novels, Cooper, Stevenson, our own Mark Twain and Howells and later
Whitman. The books--any books--have always fed my dreams and I am one
who has always lived by his dreams and even to-day I can often get as
much fun and satisfaction out of a dull book as out of a so-called
brilliant or witty one. The books like life itself are only useful to
me in as much as they feed my own dreams or give me a background upon
which I can construct new dreams.
Books I have always had access to and I am sure there is no other
country in the world where people in general are so sentimentally
romantic on the subject of books and education. Not that we read the
books or really care about education. Not we. What we do is to own
books and go to colleges and I have known more than one young man
without money work his way patiently through college without paying
much attention to what the colleges are presumed to teach. The fact
of having got through college and of having managed to get a degree
satisfies us and so the owning of books has become in most American
families a kind of moral necessity. We own the books, put them on the
shelves and go to the movies and the books, not being read and sitting
dumbly there on the shelves in the houses, fairly jump at anyone who
cares for them. It was so also in my own youth. Wherever I went someone
was always bringing me books or urging me to come to some house and
help myself and having got into most houses I could have helped myself,
if books were not offered, simply by re-arranging the shelves so there
was no gaping hole left. I did it sometimes but not often.
As for the owners, they were interested, absorbed in the great
industrial future just ahead for all Americans. We were all to have
college degrees, ride in automobiles, come by some kind of marvelous
mechanical process into a new, more cultured and better age, “Clear the
track! Come on! Get in the swim!” was the cry and later I was to take
up the cry myself and become one of the most valiant of the hustlers
but for a time--for several years--I stayed in the backwaters of life
and looked about.
My companions for the time being were flash men, the sharpshooters and
touts at the race tracks. How many such fellows as Sit-still Murphy,
Flatnose Humphrey of Frisco, Horsey Hollister and others of that stripe
I knew at that time! And there were also gamblers, a politician or two
and most of all a strange kind of sensitive and footloose man or woman,
unfitted for the life of a hustler, not shrewd, usually lovable and
perplexed, feeling themselves out of touch with the mood of the times
and often spending life getting drunk, wandering about and loving to
talk away long hours on bridges in cities, on country roads and in the
back rooms of little saloons, which for all the evil they are presumed
to have brought upon us I thank my gods existed during my youth. How
often have I said to myself: “What kind of a world will this be when
we are all moral and good people, when there are no more rascals to be
found among us and no places left where rascals may congregate to speak
lovingly of their rascalities?”
Of the rascals I met at that time there was one of a far different sort
than the others who did much to educate me in the ways of the world.
I found him in a town of northern Ohio to which I had drifted and in
which I had got a job in a stable run by a man named Nate Lovett, who
owned several race horses and who also kept a livery barn. Nate had a
stallion, a fast trotter named “Will you Please” and got most of his
income by taking him about to neighboring towns to serve mares but he
had also some ten or twelve half-wornout old driving horses that were
let to the young men of the town when they wanted to take some girl to
a dance or for a drive in the country. These I took care of, working
all day and sleeping on a cot in what we called the office but having
my evenings free. A gigantic and goodhearted Negro took care of the
racing horses and stayed in the office from eight until eleven in the
evening. “Go on child. I ain’t got no folks in this town and I don’t
want none here neither,” he said.
Lovett, a man of the English jockey type, had lost one eye in a fight
but was a quiet enough fellow, never losing his temper except when
someone spoke favorably of the Irish or of the Catholic religion. He
had a fixed notion that the Pope at Rome had made up his mind to get
control of America and had filled the land with crafty spies and agents
who worked tirelessly night and day to accomplish his ends and when
he spoke of the Irish Catholics he lowered his voice, put his hand
over his mouth, winked, scowled and acted in general like one creeping
stealthily through some mountainous country, infested with desperadoes,
and in which every tree and stone might conceal a deadly enemy.
At the stable during the long quiet winter afternoons there was little
to do so we all gathered in the office, a room some fifteen by twenty
with a large stove in the centre. There certain citizens of the town
came daily to visit us.
In the room there would be at one time Bert the Negro; Lovett, sitting
on a stool and tapping the floor with a driver’s whip; myself, taking
in everything and sometimes with my nose in a book; Tom Moseby, who
had been a gambler on a Mississippi River boat in his young days and
who always wore a large dirty white collar with a black stock; Silas
Hunt, a lawyer who had no practice nor seemed to want any and who was
said to be writing a book on the subject of constitutional law, a
book that no one ever saw; a fat German, who was a follower of Karl
Marx and who owned a large farm near the town, but who, for all his
anti-capitalistic beliefs, was said to cheat ruthlessly all who had
any sort of dealings with him; Billy West, who owned two race horses
himself and whose wife ran the town millinery store and who was himself
something of a dandy and, last of all, Judge Turner.
The judge was a short fat neatly-dressed man with a bald head, a
white Vandyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks and
extraordinarily small hands and feet. In his younger days he had a
cousin, at one time a quite powerful political figure in Ohio, and
after the Civil War the judge, an unsuccessful young lawyer, had
managed through the cousin to get himself sent South on some sort of
financial mission, to settle, I believe, certain claims covering cotton
corn and other stores requisitioned or destroyed by the conquering
Union armies.
It had been the great opportunity of the judge’s life and he had taken
shrewd advantage of it, had come near being shot in two or three
southern cities but had kept his head and had, it was whispered about,
well feathered his own and the cousin’s nest. After it was all over
and the cousin had fallen from power he had come back to his native
place--after three or four years spent in Europe, lying low in fear of
a threatened investigation of his operations--and had bought a large
brick house with a lawn and trees and had imported a Negro man-servant
from the South. He spent his time reading books and listening during
the afternoon to the talk of the men of our little circle, flattering
women rather grossly, drinking a good deal of raw whisky and delivering
himself of rather shrewd observations on life and the men he had known
and seen.
The judge had never married and indeed cared nothing for women although
he fancied himself in the rôle of a gallant who could do with women as
he pleased, a notion constantly fed by the reactions to his advances of
the women with whom his life in the town threw him into contact--the
wife of the grocer from whom he bought the supplies for his home, a
fat girl with red cheeks who clerked in the dry-goods store, Billy
West’s wife, and several others. To all these women he was elaborately
courteous, bowing before them, making pretty speeches and when no one
was watching even boldly caressing them with his little fat hands. In
the grocery he even pressed the hand of the merchant’s wife while her
lord was engaged, with his back turned, in getting a package down off a
shelf, and even sometimes pinched her hips, laughing softly while she
shook her head and scowled at him, but to me, for whom he had taken a
fancy born of my predilection for books, he spoke of women always with
contempt.
“My dislike of them is however but a peculiarity of my own nature and
I would not have it influence you in the least,” he explained. “The
French, among whom I once lived and whose language I speak, make an art
of this matter of love-making between men and women and I admire the
French exceedingly. They are a wise and shrewd people and not much
given to the talking of tommyrot I assure you.”
The judge had, early in our acquaintance, invited me to his house
where I later spent many of my evenings during that spring, drinking
his whisky, listening to his talk and smoking cigarettes with him. It
was the judge in fact who taught me to smoke cigarettes, a habit much
looked down upon in American towns at that time, being taken as an
indication of weakness and effeminacy. The judge was, however, able to
carry off his own devotion to the habit because he had been in Europe,
spoke several languages and most of all because he was reported to
be educated. In the saloons of the town, when men congregated before
the bar in the evening, the subject of cigarette smoking was often
discussed. “If I ever caught a son of mine smoking one of those coffin
nails I’d knock his fool head off,” said a drayman. “I agree with you
for all except maybe Judge Turner now,” said his companion. “For him
it’s all right. He sets a bad example maybe, but looket! Ain’t he been
to college and to Paris and London and all them places? Lord, I only
wish I had his education, that’s all I wish.”
* * * * *
I am in the judge’s house and it is dark and stormy outside. I have
dined with the Negro Bert at six in the kitchen of Nate Lovett’s house
and now, although it is but shortly past seven, the judge has also
dined and is ready for an evening of talk. There is a large stove of
the sort known as a baseburner in the room and the walls are lined with
books. We sit by a small table and there is a decanter of whisky upon
it. Although I am but eighteen the judge does not hesitate to invite me
to help myself to the whisky. “Drink all you want. If you are the kind
of a fool who makes a pig of himself you might as well find it out.”
The judge talks as we drink and his talk is something new to my ears.
These are not the words or thoughts of the towns, the city factories or
the sports of the race tracks. All of the judge’s talk is a laughing,
half-cynical, half-earnest kind of confession. Were the things the
judge told me of himself true? They were no doubt as true as these
confessions of myself and my own relations to life I am setting down
here. What I mean is that he was at least trying to inject into them
the essence of truth.
I drank of the whisky sparingly, not so much through fear of being
convicted of piggishness by getting drunk as from a desire to hear all
the judge might have to say.
At the barn when he came there to loaf with the others during the
winter afternoons the judge usually remained silent and managed
always to achieve an effect of wisdom by the good-natured but cynical
expression of his face and eyes. He sat with his fat white hands folded
over his round neatly-waistcoated paunch and looked about with the
cold little eyes that were so amazingly like the eyes of a bird. My
employer, Nate Lovett, was upon his everlasting theme. “Now you just
look at it. I wish the people would begin to do some thinking in this
country. Why, there were six Catholics elected to this last Congress
and people just sit still and say there’s no harm in a Catholic.” The
horseman was a regular subscriber to a weekly paper that attributed
all the ills of society to the growth in America of the Catholic faith
and read it eagerly--it was the only thing he did read--that his own
pet prejudice be properly fed and nourished, and no doubt there was
published somewhere a paper that carried on an equally earnest campaign
against the Protestants. My employer went to no church but the notion
of six Catholics in the national Congress alarmed him. The horseman
declared that the Catholics would in a short time come into absolute
power in America and drew a black enough picture of the future when
all of the things he so feared had come to pass. The wheels of the
factories would stop turning, streets of towns would be unlighted, men
and women would be burned at the stake, there would be no schools, no
books accessible to the general public, we would have a tyrant king
instead of a Congress and no man who did not bow his knee to the Pope
in Rome would be safe in his bed at night. The horseman declared he
had once read a book showing just the condition of affairs when the
Catholics were in power--that is to say in the Middle Ages. Pointing
the butt of his driving whip at Judge Turner he pleaded, and never in
vain, for a more learned and scholarly substantiation of his theory.
“Ain’t I right now, Judge?” he asked pleadingly. “Mind you, I ain’t
setting myself up before a man who knows more than I do and has read
all the books and been everywhere, even in Rome itself, but I’ll tell
you something. That king, that Englishman, of the name of Henry the
Eighth, who first told the Pope at Rome to go back to his Dago town and
mind his own business was some man now, wasn’t he, eh?”
And now Nate had got himself warmed up and lit into his theme. “They
say he was too free with women, that King Henry. Well, what if he
was?” he cried. “I knew a man once, Jake Freer it was, from over
near Muncie Indiana, who could get more out of a bum horse in a hard
race than any man you ever set your eyes on and he was the darndest
woman-chaser in ten states. Why, he couldn’t get near a skirt, old or
young, without prancing around like a two-year-old stud and he was
forty-five if he was a day but put him in a hard race and then you’d
see the stuff come out in him. He’d be laying back in second or third
place, let us say. Well, they gets to the upper turn and he knows he
ain’t got the speed to outstep ’em. What does he do? Does he give up?
Not he. He lets on to go crazy and begins to swear and rip around. Such
language! Lord a’mighty, how he could swear! It was wonderful to hear
him. He tells them other stiffs of drivers, laying in there ahead of
him, that he’s going to kill ’em or punch their eyes out and the first
you know he slides his old skate of a horse out in front and once in
front he stays there. They don’t dast to try to pass him. He scares his
own horse too I suppose but anyway he sure scares them other drivers.
Down he sails to the wire looking back over his shoulder making threats
and switching his long whip around. He was a big fine-looking man that
had had his cheek laid open with a razor in a fight with a nigger and
was an ugly looking man to see. “I’m going to whip hell outen you,” he
keeps saying over his shoulder, just loud enough so the judges can’t
hear him up in the stand. But them other drivers can hear him all right.
“And then what does he do? As soon as the heat is finished he hurries
up to the stand, to the judges’ stand you see, pretending to be mad
as a wildcat and he claims the other drivers put it up between them to
foul him. That’s what he does, and he talks so hard and so earnest that
he half makes the judges believe it and he gets away with maybe hitting
one of the other horses in the face with his whip at the upper turn and
throwing him off his stride or something like that.
“Now, Judge, I ask you, wasn’t he all right, if he was a woman-chaser?
And that Henry the Eighth was just like him. He told the Pope to go
hang himself and I’m an Englishman and once I told two Catholic stiffs
the same thing. They banged out this here eye of mine but you bet I
gave ’em what for, and that’s just what Henry did to the Pope, now
ain’t it?”
At the livery barn the judge had smilingly agreed with Nate Lovett that
Henry the Eighth was one of the great and noble kings of the world
and had expressed unbounded admiration for Jake Freer, adding that,
as far as his own reading and traveling had carried him, he had never
been able to find that the Catholics when they were in absolute power
all over the world had ever done anything for racing or to improve the
trotting or pacing-horse breeds. “All they did,” he remarked, quietly
“except perhaps Francesco Gonzago, Marquis of Mantua, who did rather
go in for good horses, was to build a lot of cathedrals like Chartres,
Saint Mark’s at Venice, Westminster Abbey, Mont St. Michel and others
and to inspire the loveliest and truest art in the world. But,” he said
smilingly, “what good does all that do for a man like you Nate, or for
anyone here in this town? You didn’t know Francesco, who had a knack
for fast horses, and forty cathedrals would never get you another mare
for ‘Will you Please’ or help either you or Jake Freer to win one race,
and there is at present little doubt in my own mind that the future of
America lies largely with just such men as you and Jake.”
At his own house as we sat together in the evenings, the judge paid
me the rare compliment, always deeply appreciated by a young man, of
assuming I was on the same intellectual level with himself. He smoked
cigarettes and drank surprising quantities of whisky, holding each
glass for a moment between his eyes and the light and making a queer
clicking sound with his thin dry lips as he sat looking at it.
The man talked on whatever subject came into his mind and I remember an
evening when he got on the subject of women and his own attitude toward
them and the queer feeling of sadness that crept over me as he talked.
Much of what he had to say I did not at that time understand but I
sensed the tragedy of the man’s figure as he drew for me a picture of
his life.
His father had been a Presbyterian minister and a widower in the town
to which the son came later to lead his own solitary life and the judge
said that in his youth he remembered his father chiefly as a silent
figure given to long solitary walks in fields and on country roads. “He
loved my mother I fancy,” the judge said. “Perhaps he was one of those
rare men who can really love.”
The boy had grown up, himself rather drawn away from the life of the
town, and had been sent later to a college in the East, and during
his first year in college his father died. There was a suspicion of
suicide, although little was said about it, the man having taken
an overdose of some sort of medicine given him by one of the town
physicians.
It was then that the politician cousin appeared and after the funeral
he talked to the younger man, telling him that a few days before his
death the father had come to him and talked of the son, securing from
the politician a promise that in case of his own sudden death, the lad
would be looked after and given a fair chance in life. “Your father
killed himself,” said the cousin, a rather downright fellow who was
fifteen years older than the young man he addressed. “He was in love
with your mother and was also a man who believed in a future life. What
he did was to spend years in prayer. He was always praying, day and
night as he walked around, and in the end he convinced himself that his
untiring devotion had won him so high a place in God’s esteem he would
be forgiven for doing away with his own life and would be admitted into
Heaven to live throughout eternity with the woman he loved.”
After his father’s funeral young Turner had gone back to the eastern
college and there the tragedy that had been long awaiting him suddenly
pounced.
During his boyhood, he explained, he had been rather a solitary,
spending his time in reading books and in playing on a piano that
had belonged to his mother and that his father, who was also devoted
to music, had taught him to play. “The boys of the town,” he said,
in speaking of that portion of his life, “were not of my sort and I
could not understand them. At school the larger boys often beat me
and they encouraged the younger boys in treating me with contempt. I
could not play baseball or football, physical pain of any sort made me
ill, I would begin crying when anyone spoke harshly to me, and then I
developed a kind of viciousness in myself too. Being unable to beat
the other boys with my fists and having even at that early age read a
great many books, particularly books of history, with which my father’s
library were filled, I spent my days and nights dreaming of all sorts
of sly deviltry.”
“For one thing,” the judge went on, laughing and rubbing his hands
together, “I thought a great deal of poisoning some of the boys at the
school. At the recess time we were all gathered in a large yard given
over to the boys as a playground. There was the yard without any grass
and at one side, by a high board fence, a long wooden shed into which
we went to perform certain necessary functions of the body. The board
fence separated our play place from one given over to the recreation of
the girls.”
“The walls of our own shed and our side of the fence itself were
covered with crude drawings and scrawled sentences expressing the
sensual dreams of crude and adolescent youth and these were allowed
by the authorities to remain. The place filled me with unspeakable
revulsion as did also much of the talk of the boys and I shall remember
always something that happened to me there. A great loutish boy is
standing at the door of our shed into which I am at that moment forced
by nature to go and is gazing at the sky over the high board fence
that separates us from the playground of the girls. His eyes are
heavy with stupid sensuality. From beyond the fence comes the shrill
laughter of the little girls. Suddenly, as I am about to pass--a small
creature I was then with delicate hands and at that time I believe with
small delicate features--suddenly and quite without apparent cause he
raises a large heavy hand and strikes me full in the face, so that the
blood runs in a stream from my nose, and then, without a word to me,
shrinking in terror against the fence on which the horrible pictures
and words are scrawled and mingling my blood with tears, he goes calmly
away. He is quite cheerful in fact, as though some deep want of his
nature had suddenly been satisfied.
“I had been reading a history of Italy; a most flamboyant book it was,
filled with the doings of vicious and crafty men--I now suppose they
must have been, vicious and crafty but then how I delighted in them! My
father’s being a minister had I presume turned my mind to the Church
and how I wished he had been a great and powerful cardinal or a pope of
the fifteenth century instead of what he was! I had dreamed of him as a
Cosmo de Medici and myself as that Duke Francisco who succeeded Cosmo.
“What a grand time in which to live I thought that must have been and
how I loved the book in my father’s library that described the life of
those days. In the book were such sentences! Some of them I remember
even to this day and in my bed at night, even yet sometimes, I lie
laughing with delight at the thought of the fanfaronading march of the
words across the pages of that book. ‘Italian vitality had subsided
into the repose of the tomb. The winged arrow of death entered his
heart. The hour of vengeance had struck.’
“I will read you something from the book itself,” said the judge,
pouring himself another glass of whisky, holding it for a moment
between his eyes and the light and then, after drinking, going to a
shelf from which he took a book in a red cover. After turning the pages
for a few minutes and having lighted himself a fresh cigarette he read:
“‘The emperor Charles the Fifth placed Cosmo de Medici on the ducal
chair of Florence and Pope Pius Fifth granted him the title of grand
duke of Tuscany. He was a cruel and perfidious tyrant.’”
“‘Cosmo was succeeded by Francisco, a duke who governed through the
instrumentality of the poisoned cup and the dagger, and who lapped
blood with the greed of a bloodhound. He married Bianca Cabello,
the daughter of a nobleman of Venice. She was the wife of a young
Florentine. Francisco saw her, and, inflamed by her marvelous beauty,
invited her and her husband to his palace, and assassinated her
husband. His own wife died at just that time, probably by poison, and
the grand duke married Bianca. His brother, the Cardinal Ferdinando,
displeased with the union, presented them each with a goblet of
poisoned wine, and they sank into the grave together.’”
“Aha!” cried Judge Turner, looking over the top of the book at me and
laughing gleefully. “There you are, you see. That was myself in my
boyhood, that young Francisco. In my fancy I succeeded, when there
was no one about, when I was walking alone along the sidewalks of
this very town or when I had got into my bed at night, I succeeded
I say in making the great metamorphosis. In the books in my father’s
library were many pictures of the streets of old Italian and Spanish
cities. There was one I sharply remember. Two young bloods, with cloaks
over their shoulders and with swords swinging at their sides, are
approaching each other along a street. Two or three monks, a man seated
on the back of a donkey going along a narrow roadway, a great stone
bridge in the far distance, a bridge spanning perhaps a deep dark gulf
between high mountain peaks, peaks faintly seen amid clouds and in the
foreground, near the two young men and dominating the whole scene, a
great cathedral done in the glorious Gothic style that I myself later,
in my real flesh and blood life, so loved and bowed down before at
Chartres in France.”
“And there was I, in fancy you understand, one of the two young men
walking in that glorious street and not frightened little Arthur
Turner, son of a sad and discouraged Presbyterian minister in an Ohio
town. There was the metempsychosis. I was Francisco before he had
succeeded Cosmo and had become himself the great and charmingly wicked
duke sitting in his ducal chair, and long before he became enamored
of the lovely Bianca. Every day I went into my own little room in my
father’s house and got out a sword of wood I had fashioned from a lath
and buckled it on. I had got one of my father’s coats from a closet and
this, serving me as a cloak, I imagined it of the finest Florentine
stuff, a cloak of such stuff as would become the shoulders of one who
belonged to the great Medici family and who was to sit in the proud
ducal chair of Florence. Up and down the room I went and below my
father, the sad long-faced man, had become in my fancy the great Cosmo
himself. We were in our ducal palace and cardinals in their red cloaks,
princes, captains of armies, ambassadors and other princely personages
were waiting at the door for a word with the great Cosmo.
“Welladay! My own time would come. For the present I was concerning
myself with the study of poisons. On a little table in my room I had
a collection of various small receptacles, an old saltcellar with a
broken top, two small teacups, an empty baking-powder can and other
small vessels, found in the street or stolen from our kitchen, and
into these I had put salt, flour, pepper, ginger and other spices
taken also by stealth from the kitchen. I mixed and remixed, making
various colored powders which I folded into small packets or dampened
and rolled into little balls which I concealed about my person, and
then went forth into the street, to visit in fancy other palaces or to
poison, or run through with my sword, people who were enemies of our
house. What beautifully wicked men and women all about me and with what
suavity we greeted each other! How deeply we loved and served--to the
very death--our friends and how quietly crafty and urbane we were with
our enemies! Oh, I loved then the word urbane. What a glorious word, I
thought. At that time, as the young Francisco, I was determined that if
my craftiness could raise me to the great office of pope I would take
for myself the name Urbane, adding the ‘e’ to a name already taken by
some of them.
“These were my dreams, and then, well I was compelled to go to the town
school and sit sometimes in that horrible shed facing the crude and
terrible scrawlings on the walls and to become also the victim of the
crude outbreaks of my companions.
“Until one day in the spring. I had gone for a walk with my father in
the late afternoon after school was dismissed and we were botanizing,
as my father was fond of doing, both for his own edification and also
I suppose in order to further his son’s education. In a meadow at the
edge of a strip of woodland into which we were passing I found a white
mushroom with which I ran to father. ‘Throw it away,’ he cried. ‘It is
an Amanita Phalloides, the Destroying Angel. A bit of it no larger than
a mustard seed would destroy your life.’
“We returned to our own house and sat down for the evening meal with
the words ‘Amanita Phalloides’ ringing in my ears and with the round
bell-like shape of the Amanita Phalloides dancing before my eyes. It
was white, of a strange glowing whiteness, suggesting I thought not
the death of some common man of low degree but that of a prince or a
great duke. It was so Francisco and Bianca must have looked, I thought,
when in the words of the flamboyant writer of the book in my father’s
library, they ‘sank into the grave together.’ There must have been just
that very white metallic pallor on their cheeks. What a picture of that
sinking I had in my fancy. It was not just a grave, a mere dirty hole
scooped out of the ground, as graves were wont to be in our Ohio town.
No indeed! An opening had been made in the earth it is true but this
had been entirely rimmed with flowers and was filled with a liquid, a
soft purple perfumed liquid. And so into the grave went the bodies of
myself as Francisco and of my lovely paramour, Bianca. The weight of
our golden robes made us sink slowly into the soft purple flood and as
we sank from sight music from the lips of all the fair children of the
aristocracy of Florence was wafted far over fair fields, while back of
the massed children in white stood also--upon a kind of green eminence
at the foot of a majestic mountain--all the great lords, dukes,
cardinals and other dignitaries of our imperial city.
“It was so that, as the grown-up Francisco, I was to die but I was yet
alive and there was the Amanita Phalloides--later when I grew older
I laughed to myself and told myself it should have been a Phallus
Impudicus--there it was lying on the grass in the meadow at the edge
of the wood. I had placed it carefully there at the command of my
father and had, oh very carefully, marked the spot. One went along the
main road leading out of town, to the south, to a certain bridge and
across a meadow by a cowpath, climbed a fence, walked a certain number
of steps along a rail fence beside a young wheat field, where elders
grew, crossed another meadow and came to the edge of the wood. There
was a stump near which grew a bush and even as I sat with father at our
evening meal and as our housekeeper, a fat silent old woman with false
teeth that rattled sometimes as she talked, even as she served the
evening meal I was repeating to myself a certain formula I had made on
our homeward journey. One hundred and nineteen steps along the cowpath
in the meadow, ninety-three steps along the fence in the shadow of the
elders, two hundred and six steps across the second meadow to the stump
and my prize.
“I had determined to get the Amanita Phalloides on that very night
after my father and our housekeeper had gone to sleep and although
I was terribly frightened at the prospect of the tramp along lonely
country roads and across fields, that I imagined were at night infested
by strange and ferocious beasts lying in wait ready to destroy, I did
not think of giving up for that reason.
“And so in fact in the middle of that very night, when all in our house
and in the town were asleep, I went. Buckling on my wooden sword and
creeping silently downstairs I let myself out at the kitchen door,
having first supplied myself with matches and two or three bits of
candle from a kitchen shelf.
“Oh, how I suffered on that journey and how determined I was! When I
had got out from among the silent terrifying houses and had come nearly
to the place where I was to turn off the highroad two men on horseback
passed and I hid myself, lying on my belly, white and silent, in a
ditch at the side of the road. ‘They are desperadoes going forth to
kill,’ I told myself.
“And then they were gone and I could no longer hear the tramp of their
horses and there was the trip to be made across the fields, recounting
the steps as I had counted them during the homeward journey that
afternoon with my father. During the walk homeward that afternoon both
father and myself were muttering to ourselves, he praying no doubt that
when he had taken his own life God would admit him into Heaven and into
the company of the woman he loved and I counting steadily ‘eighty-six,
eighty-seven, eighty-eight,’ counting steadily the steps that would
lead me again to the Amanita Phalloides, to the Destroying Angel, with
which I dreamed I might take many lives.
“I got my prize by the aid of the matches and the bits of candle and
after a good deal of nervous fumbling about, creeping on my hands and
knees in the wet grass,” said the old judge laughing in his peculiarly
bitter and at the same time half-jolly way. “I got it and ran all the
way home, imagining every bush and every deep shadow on the road and in
the fields might contain man or beast lying in wait ready to destroy
me. Then later I managed without the old housekeeper knowing to dry
it on a small shelf at the back of our kitchen stove and after it was
thoroughly dried I powdered it and putting the horrible powder I had
concocted into papers, carried them off with me to school.”
“Many of the boys of our school lived at a distance and carried their
luncheons and I fancied myself going nonchalantly into the hallway
where the luncheon pails were left standing in a row and sprinkling
the powders over their contents. As for the boys who went home at the
noon hour--well, you see I had read in one of the books in my father’s
library of a certain elegant lady of Pisa who once cut a peach, handing
half of it to a gallant she wished to destroy and herself eating the
other quite harmless half. I thought I might work out some such scheme,
using an apple instead of a peach and working some of the poison under
the skin of one side with a pin point.”
The judge had been laughing, I thought in a somewhat nervous manner,
as he told me the above tale of his youth. “To be sure I never really
intended to poison anyone,” he said. “Well now, did I or did I not?
I really can’t say. I had achieved however, through the accidental
discovery of the qualities of the Amanita Phalloides, a certain new
attitude toward myself. As I went about with the little poison packets
in my pockets I felt suddenly a new kind of respect for myself. I
felt power in myself and something quite new to the other boys must
have crept at about this time into the expression of my eyes. I was
no longer frightened and did not shrink away or begin crying when one
of the bullies of the school approached me at the recess time now
and--could it be true?--I felt they were suddenly afraid of me. The
thought filled me with a queer sort of joy and I walked boldly about
the school yard, not strutting but at the same time shrinking from no
one. There was at that time a report current among the boys--I do not
know where it came from but it was believed and I did not deny it--that
I carried a loaded pistol about in my pocket.”
The judge--and by the way his title was a quite spurious one given him
by his fellow-townsmen late in his life because he had been a lawyer,
because he had money, had been in the government service and had been
to Europe--the judge now told me of his experience as a young man in
college. Now that I come to think of it he no doubt did not tell me
at one time all the things I am here setting down. During that winter
and spring I spent a great many evenings in his company and he talked
continuously of himself, of his cheating the men of the South to get
money for himself and cousin, of his wanderings in Europe, of the men
he had met at home and abroad and of what he had concluded concerning
men’s lives, their motives and impulses and what he thought it would be
best for me to do to make my own life as happy as possible.
He had returned at the end of his own life to live out his days alone
in his native place because, as he said, one had in the end to accept
his own time, place and people, whatever they might be, and that one
gained nothing by wandering about the earth among strangers. During his
middle years he had thought he would live out his life in some European
town or city, in Chartres where, while he lived there for some months,
he was all tender with love and regard for the men of a bygone age who
had built the lovely cathedral at that place; at Oxford where he had
spent some months wandering filled with joy among the old colleges
and under the great trees that line the river Thames; in London where
he got to have a great respect for the half-stupid but as he said
wholly dignified self-respect of the young Englishmen he saw walking
in the Strand or along Piccadilly; or in some more colorful town of
the south like Madrid or Florence. The French and Paris he declared
he could not understand, although he wanted very much to understand
and be understood by them, as he felt they were in a way more like
himself than any of the others of the Europeans he had seen. “I learned
to speak their language quite fluently,” he said, “but they never
really took me into their lives. The men I met, painters, writers and
fellows of that sort, went about with me, borrowed my money and tried
continually to sell me inferior paintings but I always realized they
were laughing up their sleeves, and just what about I couldn’t make out
or perhaps I shouldn’t have cared.”
In the end the judge had come home to his Ohio town and had settled
down to his books, his whisky and his companionship with such men
as Nate Lovett, Billy West, and the others. “We are what we are, we
Americans,” he said, “and we had better stick to our knitting. Anyway,”
he added, “people are nice here as far as I have been able to observe
and although they are filled with stupid prejudices and are fools, the
common people, workers and the like, such as the men of this town,
wherever you find them, are about the nicest folk one ever finds.”
* * * * *
As for the judge’s experience as a young college man and the sort of
tragedy that then came and that no doubt set the tone of his after
life, it was stupid enough. With his mind filled with the thoughts
taken from the books in his father’s library and after a boyhood of
such loneliness and brooding as I have here described he went to
college filled with high hopes but was there doomed to live as lonely
an existence as he had lived in his home town. The young men of the
college, given for the most part to the cultivation of athletic sports
and to going about to parties and dances with the girls of a near-by
city, did not take to young Turner and he did not take to them.
And then during his second year something happened. There was a young
man in one of the upper classes, an athlete of note but at the same
time an earnest student, toward whom the Ohio boy’s fancy now turned.
It was an entirely sentimental affair, as the man afterward explained
and might have done him no harm had he been content never to give it
any kind of expression.
He did however near the end of his second year try to give it
expression. For weeks he had been going about, much like a young girl
in love, thinking constantly of the athlete, of his splendid rugged
figure, fine eyes and quick active mind and of how wonderful it would
be if he could have an intimate friendship with such a fellow. He
dreamed of walks the two might take together in the evenings under the
elms that grew on the campus. “I thought he would take my arm or I
would take his and we would walk and talk,” Judge Turner said, and I
remember that as he spoke he got out of his chair and walked about the
room and that his small white hands played nervously over the front of
his coat. He seemed not to want to face me as he told the more vital
part of his tale but going behind my chair walked up and down the room
at my back, and I remember how, although I was then but a boy, I knew
he suffered and wanted to put his arms about me as he talked but did
not dare. My own heart was filled with sadness so that unknown perhaps
to him tears came in my eyes and what part of his tragedy and his words
I did not understand I am sure I did dimly sense the meaning of.
He had, it happened, gone about for months thinking of the older fellow
of his college as one much like himself but blessed with a stronger
body, greater ability to make his way in the world and no doubt also
wanting to give something of himself, or something beautiful outside
himself that would represent some spirit of himself, to another man.
Once young Turner went to a near-by city and spent a whole afternoon
going from shop to shop trying to find some bit of jewelry, a painting
or something of the sort he himself thought lovely and that would be
within the limits of his own slender means that he might in secret
send to the man he so admired.
“For women I did not care,” the judge said huskily. “To tell the truth
I was afraid of women. In a relationship made with a woman one, I
thought, risked too much. It might be quite altogether perfect or it
might be just nothing at all. To tell the truth I did not then have
and never have had enough assurance of fineness in myself to make it
possible for me to approach a woman with the object of becoming her
lover and I was not then and never have been a strong lustful man and I
had, even at that time, put all thought of anything very definite ever
happening between myself and a woman utterly aside.”
“I had put the thought aside, and had taken up this other, you see.
Between myself and the young athlete I had created in fancy a relation
that would never attempt to come to any sort of physical expression. We
would live, I dreamed, each his own life, each gathering what beauty
might be possible from the great outer world and bringing it as a prize
to the other. There would be this man I loved and of whom I asked
nothing and toward whom my whole impulse would be forever just to give
and give to the very top of my bent.
“You understand how it was, or rather of course you do not understand
now but some day it may be you will,” said the voice coming from the
thin lips of the small fat man walking up and down the room behind me
in the house in Ohio. “I did a foolish thing,” said the voice. “One day
I wrote a note to the man telling something of the dream that had been
in my mind and as I had nothing else to send I went to a florist’s and
sent him a great bunch of beautiful roses.”
“I got no answer to the note but later he showed it about and all
during the rest of my days at the school--and out of a kind of
blind determination I stayed on there until I graduated and had got
my degree, my expenses after my father’s death being paid by my
cousin--during all the rest of my days at the school I was looked upon
generally as a--perhaps you do not even know the meaning of the word--I
was looked upon as a pervert.
“There was another and more vulgar word, a word I had seen on the walls
of the shed and on the board fence when I was a schoolboy that was
also shouted at me. Like my father before me I, in my trouble, took to
walking in the streets and in lonely places at night. The word would
be shouted at me from the darkness or from the steps of a house as I
stumbled along in the darkness and I had not then, as I had when I was
a lad, the satisfaction of thinking of myself as another Francisco, as
one who could resort to poison powders to assert his own supremacy and
to reëstablish himself with himself.
“I was simply determined I would finish my days in college and would
not follow my father’s footsteps in taking my own life--having then and
always having had a queer sort of respect, do you see, for life as it
manifested itself in my own body--that I would finish my days in that
place and that I would then, at the first opportunity, get hold of
enough money to make myself respected among the men with whom and in
whose company I would in all likelihood have to live out my days.
“I conceived, do you see, of money-making as the only sure method to
win respect from the men of the modern world and as for you, my lad,
if you have sensibilities as I suppose you have or I should not have
taken the trouble to invite you to my house--as for you, my lad, if an
opportunity comes to you, as it did to me when my cousin got me sent
South, you had better take advantage of it,” said the judge, coming
from behind my chair and standing before me to pour himself another
glass of the whisky which he drank this time I noticed without the
customary little ceremony of holding it for a moment between his eyes
and the light.
I thought, or I may fancy I then thought, that the judge’s bright
birdlike eyes were clouded and looked tired as he said these last
words and that his hands as he poured the whisky trembled a little but
perhaps the notion but springs from my more mature fancy playing over a
dramatic moment in life.
And at any rate he came to loaf away the next afternoon at the stable
and was as he always had been, sitting in silence, listening to
the talk that went round and folding his fat little hands over his
neatly-waistcoated paunch. And when he spoke he, as always, concealed
under so thick a coat of good-natured toleration what sarcasm may have
lurked in his words that he won and seemed always to hold the respect
of all of his hearers.