BERNERS, the merchant and horseman, had for a good many years been
disappointed and hurt by the thought that his family was not to carry
on after his death but in his old age had grown cheerful about the
matter. “We aren’t so much. It doesn’t matter. I dare say the sun will
come up mornings and the moon at night when there are no more Berners
in Illinois, or anywhere else, for that matter.” As a child the boy
Alonzo was always sickly. “We’ve always been thinking he’d die, about
twice every year, but you see he hasn’t quite done it yet,” the old man
said softly.
Hallie, the daughter of the house, was five years older than her
brother and was devoted to him. After seeing them together one
understood that she could never have married. It was just a thing
that couldn’t have happened. One thought of her as saying to herself:
“Marriage is too intimate. I am not made for intimate relations.” The
idea of Hallie Berners held in a man’s arms was for some obscure reason
monstrous and yet how affectionate she was! There was a sense in which
her brother and father were babes in her charge, babes never touched by
her hands or her lips but constantly caressed by her thoughts. She was
a tall rather stern-looking woman with graying hair, large strong hands
and quiet gray eyes and she was very shy. Her shyness expressed itself
in severity and when she was much touched she grew silent and almost
haughty in her bearing. It was as though she were saying to herself:
“Look out now! If you are not careful you will let something precious
escape you.”
The son Alonzo was a man of thirty-five with a little black mustache,
thin features, small delicate hands and thick, black hair. As a young
man he had gone away to an eastern college but a desperate illness had
compelled him to come home almost at once and he had not again tried
getting out from under his sister’s care, only leaving the family roof
when he crept away for the brief periods of drunkenness that gave him a
temporary means of escape out of his house of pain. He stayed at home
and on fair days sometimes rode about town and the surrounding country
behind an old black horse that belonged to the family or sat in the
garden under the apple trees talking with friends who came to see him.
In a large room in the house where he stayed on dull or cold days there
were a couch, a fireplace and many books on shelves built into the
walls.
How many people came up along the hillside road to sit and talk with
Alonzo Berners! Were they sorry for him? At first I thought they were
and then I saw they came to receive rather than to give. It was Alonzo
who did the giving to all. What did he give? Among those I saw at the
house was a local judge, son of that judge with whom his father had
lived when he was a boy, a man named Marvin Manno, who lived in Chicago
but who often came to the town and spent two or three days for the sake
of talking with the invalid and who paid him a visit during my time
there, two or three doctors who came, not in a professional way but
for something unprofessional they wanted, a cripple of the town who
made his living by taking people’s photographs, a man who bought and
sold horses, and a tall silent boy who wore glasses and who had large
protruding teeth so that he looked something like a horse when on rare
occasions he smiled.
Life in the Berners household--in reality presided over by the sick
man, in a queer way absolutely controlled by him--was a revelation to
me. Like that Judge Turner I had known a few years before, and for
that matter like myself too, the man had read a great many books and
was still constantly reading--he spent more than half his time with a
book in his hands and told me once that but for books he thought he
should have gone mad from the gnawing pains that were always eating at
him--but in the single fact that we were all readers the similarity
between Judge Turner, Alonzo and myself ceased.
In this new man whose path I had unexpectedly crossed was a quiet kind
of sanity unknown in any other I had seen. He was a giver. What did he
give? The question amazed and startled me. He was loved by all who knew
him and during the week I spent in his house, seeing him with other
men and riding with him about town and out into the country, I was
startled by the feeling of love and well-being that came into the eyes
of people when he appeared among them. My own mind, always given to
asking questions, unable to take anything for granted, raced like the
stallion Peter Point carrying old Jim Berners to one of his victories.
Was there a kind of power in pain to remake a man? My own conception of
life was profoundly disturbed. The man before me had spent his entire
life sitting in the dark house of pain. He sat there now looking out
through the windows and into other houses that were alive and cheerful
with health. Why had he health and sanity within himself while, almost
without exception, the others including myself had not?
As I looked at him and at the men who came to visit him a kind of
wonder grew within me. The man Marvin Manno, a slender man, rather
elegantly clad and with gold-rimmed glasses on his large nose, was
talking. He was connected, in an official capacity, with some large
commercial establishment of the city, an establishment that sold goods
to the Berners store, but he did not come to the town on business.
Why had he come? He spoke continually of his own schemes and hopes
and balanced oddly back and forth between devotion to the business
interests he served and a kind of penchant he had for writing poetry.
An odd effect was produced. The man was sincerely devoted to two
interests in life that could not by any chance be combined and as one
listened to his talk one became more and more puzzled. Only Alonzo
Berners was not puzzled. He entered into the man’s thoughts, understood
him, gave him what he apparently wanted, sympathetic understanding
without sentimentality. We sat in the garden back of the Berners house,
the man Manno talked, a doctor came and spoke of his patients, and in
particular of an old woman lying in a cabin down by the river, who for
two years had been on the point of death but who could not die. Then
the judge spoke of his father and of political affairs in the state,
the elder Berners boasted of the speed of the stallion Peter Point and
the boy with the large teeth smiled shyly but remained silent.
Then when evening came and they had all gone away I looked at Alonzo
Berners and wondered. In all the talk no mention was ever made of
himself or his own affairs. Even the pain always present in his body
had been forgotten by the others. Any mention of his suffering would
have seemed out of place.
My own mind was groping about in a new medium for the expression
of a life. I was very young then, had not yet come to the age of
citizenship, but for a long time I had been building within myself my
own consciousness of men. Well, they were a kind of thing, selfish and
self-centred, and they were right in being so. One played the game, won
if he could and tried not to be a bellyacher if he lost. In me was a
kind of contempt for men including myself that Alonzo Berners did not
have. Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it?
Was he right and I wrong or was he a sentimentalist? My mind had run
into a thicket of new ideas and I could not find my way out. “Tread
softly,” I said to myself.
I sat aside, near the boy with the teeth, looking at my new
acquaintance and trying to straighten all these things out in my mind.
Hundreds of men, famous and infamous, I had met in the books I had
read, went as in a procession across the field of my fancy. How many
books I had read and how many stories of the lives of men, so-called
great men and rascals, lovely women with gold and jewels in their
hands, great killers of men, lawgivers, daring breakers of the law,
devout men, starving in deserts for the glory of God; what men and
women, what vast resounding names!
Was there something in the books I had missed? A vagrant thought
came. Across the pages of some of the books there had wandered a
different kind of man or woman. The writers of books had little to
say about such people. There was little enough to be said. In the
stories told of the great they appeared always as minor characters.
The great strutted. The others walked softly. Clement VII had sent
an ambassador to Charles of Spain. What the ambassador, one of the
mysterious quiet fellows, said to Charles “Emperor of the Romans and
Lord of the whole world” (_Romanorum Imperator semper augustus, mundi
totius Dominus, universus dominis, Universis Principibus et Populis
semper verendus_) one did not know, but a peculiar thing happened.
The ambassador served faithfully both Charles and the Pope, endeared
himself to the two mortal enemies. They were both happier with him
about. A thousand conflicting interests swirled about him but he kept
himself quite clear. Could it have been that such a one loved men, as
men, and that men loved him? There was so little for the writers of
books to say of such fellows. They had not sought exalted office and
seemed content to play the minor rôle in life. What were they up to?
Was there a power greater than obvious power, a power not having in it
the disease of obvious power?
I looked about me and wondered. Before me, sitting among men in an
Illinois village, was a pale man with delicate hands who, two or three
times a year, became hopelessly drunk and who then had to be brought
back helpless to his home, as I had brought him a few days before. Men
gathered about and talked of their own affairs and he sat for the most
part in silence, saying only now and then a few words, always in their
interests. His mind seemed always to follow the minds of the others.
Did he have no life of his own?
I began to resent the man but as I sat with him the cynicism of Judge
Turner I had so much admired lost some of its force in me and the elder
Berners, condemning men as less worthy of life than race horses became
a half-amusing figure. I was mystified and amazed. Did most men and
women remain children and was Alonzo Berners grown up? Was it grown up
to come to the realization that oneself did not matter, that nothing
mattered but a kind of consciousness of the wonder of life outside
oneself?
I sat under the apple trees smiling to myself and wondering why I
smiled. Was there possible such a thing as goodness in men, a goodness
that was not stuffy and hateful? Like most young men I had a contempt
of goodness. Had I been making a mistake? The man before me now did
not, like Judge Turner, say wise and witty things that remained fixed
in the mind and that could afterward be passed off in conversations as
one’s own. Later in New York and in other American cities I was to see
a good many men of a sort not unlike Judge Turner but few like Alonzo
Berners. The smart fellows of the American Intelligentsia sat about
in restaurants in New York and wrote articles for the political and
semi-literary weeklies. A smart saying they had heard at dinner or at
lunch the day before was passed off as their own in the next article
they wrote. The usual plan was to write of politics or politicians or
to slaughter some second-rate artist--in short, to pick out easy game
and kill it with their straw shafts and they gained great reputations
by pointing out the asininity of men everyone already knew for asses.
For a great many years I was filled with admiration of such fellows
and vaguely dreamed of becoming such another myself. I wanted then, as
a young man, I think, to sit with Alonzo Berners and his friends and
suddenly say something to upset them all. Alonzo’s life of physical
suffering was forgotten by me as by the others but unlike them there
was in me a kind of unpleasant dislike of him, a dislike he saw and
understood but let pass as being boyish vanity. The smart-seeming
things I thought of to say sounded flat enough when I said them over
to myself and I remained silent. Occasionally Alonzo turned to me and
smiled. I had done him a kindness, had risked something for him, and I
was his guest. Perhaps he thought me not mature enough to understand
him and his kind of men. Would I ever become mature?