ON a certain Sunday morning of that summer I found myself sitting in
a little garden under apple trees back of a red brick house that had
green window blinds and that stood on the side of a hill near the edge
of an Illinois town of some five or six thousand people. Sitting by
a small table near me was a dark slender man with pale cheeks, a man
I had never seen until late on the evening before and who I had half
thought would die but a few hours earlier. Now, although the morning
was warm, he had a blanket wrapped around him and his thin hands, lying
on the table, trembled. Together we were drinking our morning coffee,
containing a touch of brandy. A robin hopped on the grass near by and
the sunlight falling through the branches of the trees made yellow
patches at our feet.
I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of the
circumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. The
garden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through the
centre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowers
about the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence were
tall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees and
near by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the garden
one got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the
elders there was a road that led along a hillside down into town.
The town itself was old, for that Illinois country, and had already had
two lives. First, it had been a river town on the banks of a stream
that led down into the Mississippi, and now it was a merchandising
centre. Later perhaps it would become a factory town. The river life
had died, when the railroads came but there still were some remnants
of the older place, one or two streets of small log stores and houses
standing on a bluff above the river and now used as residences by
farm laborers. The old town, left thus off by itself half forgotten
by the new town, was picturesque. In the company of my strange new
acquaintance and once with his father, an old man who had lived in the
river town in the days of its prosperity, I later spent several hours
among the old houses. Dogs and pigs wandered through the deep dust of
the principal street facing the river or slept in the shade of the
old buildings and the old man told me that even in its better days
it was a quite terrible place. In the winter, in the early days, the
roads were hub deep to the wagons with mud, the houses were small and
near each house was an outhouse that smelled horribly in summer and
invited millions of flies. Pigs, cows and horses were kept in little
sheds near the houses and often diseases, encouraged by the utter lack
of sanitation, swept through the town and sometimes carried off whole
families.
The older of the two men, named Jim Berners, was a merchant, owning
with his son a large store on the principal street of the newer town
and had been brought to the Illinois town when he was a child. His
father, an Englishman, had come to America as a young man and for
several years had been a merchant in the city of Philadelphia. Having
married there and wanting to establish himself as the head of a landed
family in the new country he had come to Illinois when land could be
had at a low price and had bought five hundred acres of river bottom
land.
With his young wife and his three children he lived in the river town
and had cleared and got ready for planting most of his land when
misfortune came down upon him. In the crude little towns of that day
doctors were for the most part half educated, the houses were stuffy
and full of drafts in winter and epidemics of smallpox, followed by
scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhus came and could not be checked.
Within two years the merchant’s rather delicate wife died and her death
was followed by his own and by the death of two of his three children.
There was only the babe left alive and he had been put in charge of an
old judge with whom the father had formed a friendship.
The young Berners had grown into manhood in the household of the judge,
whose great boast it was that he was a personal friend of Abraham
Lincoln. He told me he had never been ill a day in his life. Upon
reaching manhood he sold three hundred acres of his land and like his
father became a merchant.
Father and son still owned the Berners merchandising establishment
although they seemed to give it little attention.
What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintance
the younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he had
got quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a
sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain.
The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attempt
to free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After the
drunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and then
there came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tense
nerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent the
days talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town in
a buggy.
On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year at
regular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away without
warning to his father or to an older sister of the household, young
Alonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-sea
sailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer but
had tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had also
gone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whose
hands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached to
the Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first as
clerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavily
built man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidently
from an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddling
gait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying to
make its way rapidly along on land.
In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agricultural
implements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand other
things and there was also a harness shop in the main building facing
the town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an
alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings in
which were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins of
corn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.
The whole establishment, an infinitely busy place, was run by the
sailor who could neither read or write but who was helped by a
stern-looking woman bookkeeper. The sailor was shrewd wise and jolly
and had always some tale of life on the deep sea to tell to his farmer
customers. He was the most popular man in town and there was another
feature that added tremendously to the popularity of the store. In the
spring, just before planting time, and in the fall after the crops were
harvested, the Berners gave a great feast in one of the sheds. The hay
corn and lumber were taken out and long wooden tables erected, while
invitations were sent far and wide to the town and country people.
Women of the town and country wives came to help prepare the feast, the
old sailor waddled about shouting, pigs, turkeys, calves and lambs were
killed, bushels of potatoes baked, pies and cakes, baked in advance by
the women, were brought and there was a feast lasting sometimes all
afternoon and far into the night. Alonzo Berners had provided many
barrels of beer and the sailor and his pals among the farmers got half
drunk and sang songs and made speeches while the professional men of
the town, the lawyers, judges and doctors, all came and made speeches.
What a storm of talk! Even the preachers and the rival merchants were
there and a prayer was said as each new group sat down to the feast,
the ministers shaking their heads over the beer drinking but falling to
with a will at the food. The two annual affairs must often have cost
the Berners a good part of the profits made during the year but they
did not mind. “It doesn’t matter,” said the elder Berners. “I’m old and
nearly ready to die, it isn’t likely Alonzo will live very long and as
for Hallie,” meaning the daughter, “I have already given her one of my
two farms. The Berners are going to peter out anyway and why should
they care about leaving money behind them?”
The elder Berners, a man of seventy, rarely went into town but spent
most of his days in his little garden and during my own visit at the
house he came every day to sit with me, smoking his pipe and talking
until he fell asleep in his chair. When he had been a younger man and
before his wife died he had owned several trotting horses of which he
loved to talk. One of the horses, named “Peter Point,” had been the
pride and joy of his life and he spoke of the horse as of a beloved son.
Oh, what a great magnificent beast the stallion Peter Point had been
and how he could trot! Sometimes when he spoke of him the old man
jumped to his feet and climbing on the chair seat touched the limb
of an apple tree with his fingers. “Looket here now. He was taller
than that. Yes, siree! He was taller than that when he threw up his
head,” he declared, jumping down from the chair and hopping about like
an excited boy and walking up and down before me rubbing his hands
together. He told me a long tale of a trip he had once taken with his
stallion and two trotting mares as far east as Pennsylvania and of how
Peter Point won every race in which he started, always the trotting
free-for-all, and spoke fervently of the moment when he came out with
the others and paraded before the grandstand before the first heat of a
race. Jim Berners, then young and strong, sat in the sulky and what a
moment it was for him. The memory of it filled him with excitement. “My
father used to talk of the English aristocracy to his friend the judge,
with whom I was left when all my family died, and the judge told me
tales of what he had to say. Sometimes on days like that, when we came
out for the first heat and were scoring down for the start or going
slowly back for another try after a false start, I used to think of his
words. There was me, sitting in the sulky, and there was the man, old
Charlie Whaley, who took care of Peter Point, standing over near the
grandstand with a blanket over his shoulder. Charlie winked and nodded
at me and I winked at him. How swelled up with pride I was. I usually
had two or three hundred dollars bet on Peter’s chances and he never
once went back on me. I thought we were pretty aristocratic ourselves,
Peter and me.”
“Well, and so there we were jogging slowly up to the starting place and
the people in the grandstand were shouting and down in the betting ring
there was a hubbub and I used to look at the people and think about
them and about myself and the horse too. ‘Lordy,’ I used to say to
myself, ‘what a lot we do think of ourselves and what God-awful things
we are, we humans, come right down to it.’ I was raised in the old
Judge Willard’s house, right here in this town, you know, and in the
old days a lot of what we called our big men used to come to talk their
affairs over with the judge. Abe Lincoln used to come and once the
editor of the _Chicago Tribune_ and young Logan who afterward got
to be governor, and a lot of others, congressmen, and other such truck.
They came and planned and schemed and then they used to make speeches
up in front of the town hall that was down by the river in the old town
but that later burned to the ground. They talked and talked, and I used
to listen.
“And such talk! ‘All men are created free and equal,’ ‘Nature’s
noblemen,’ ‘Noble pioneers’ and all that kind of stuff about men just
like me. Lordy, what a lot of big sounding words I had listened to
when I was a kid. It used to make me sick to think of it sometimes
later, when I was sitting up there behind Peter and to think that I had
sometimes believed such bunk myself, I who had seen and known a lot of
them same pioneers pretty intimately and should have known better than
to listen.
“As I say, I used to think about it and a lot of other foolishness I’d
heard, when I was up behind Peter, and he with his head up so high and
looking--say, he could walk past one of them grandstands and past all
of them people like God Almighty himself might have walked! What I mean
is, not giving the people or the other horses in the race or the other
drivers or the judges up in the stand or me or anyone anything but
his darned contempt. It was lovely to see. Sometimes when he’d see a
mare he’d throw up his head and snort and sometimes there was a little
quiet noise he made just as though he was saying to us ‘You worms, you
worms,’ to all of us, all of the people in the world including myself.
“Why, hell, no one ever knew how fast that Peter could trot. He got
sick and died before he ever got to the grand circuit where horses of
his own class usually raced,” the old man declared proudly. Jim Berners
had taken his horses over into Ohio and with Peter had won a race at a
place called Fostoria and then that night the horse was taken violently
ill and lying down in his stall quietly died.
His owner had been in at the death and after the stallion was dead
had walked about the dark race course the rest of the night and had
decided to give up racing. “I took a turn about the track,” he said,
“and stood a long time at the head of the stretch thinking of the times
I had made the turn up there, with Peter leading all the other horses,
and not half extending himself at that, and of how proud I had been so
many times, sitting behind him and pretending to myself I was doing the
job. I wasn’t doing a darned thing but sitting still and riding home in
front. It was only after Peter died I ever told myself the truth.”
“I stood up at the head of the stretch, as I said, and the moon came
out and Peter was dead now and I decided to go home. And I had some
thoughts that night about most human beings, including myself, that I
haven’t ever forgot. I thought a lot of us were swine and the rest a
kind of half-baked lot, put us against a horse like Peter had been.
‘And so,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll quit racing and go home and try to
keep my mouth shut a good deal of the time.’ And I haven’t been too
much stuck on myself or anyone else ever since.”