MY adventure with Alonzo Berners came to an end after I had been at his
house for a week and during the week nothing I can set down as notable
happened at all and later I was told he was dead, that he had again got
drunk in the city of Chicago and had fallen or had been knocked off a
bridge into the Chicago River where he drowned. There was the house on
the hillside and the garden. During my visit to the house the elder
Berners worked in the garden or sat with me boasting of the horse Peter
Point and found in me a sympathetic audience. I have always understood
horses better than men. It’s easier.
I sat in the garden listening to the talk of the men who came to see
Alonzo Berners, rode with him once in his buggy or went into town
to walk by myself or to listen to some tale told by the sailor who
managed the store. The sister, who on the night of my arrival had
treated me coldly--no doubt strange characters had come to the Berners
house on the same mission that had brought me and also no doubt she
was in terrible fear when Alonzo was away on one of his helpless
debauches--the sister later treated me with the silent kindliness
characteristic of her.
Nothing happened at all during my visit and Alonzo Berners did not
during the whole time say a notable thing that I could later remember
and that I can now quote to explain my feeling for him.
Nothing happened but that I was puzzled as I had never been before.
There was something in the very walls of the Berners house that excited
and when I had gone to bed at night I did not sleep. Notions came.
Odd exciting fancies kept me awake. As I have explained I was then
young and had quite made up my mind about men and life. Men and women
were divided into two classes containing a few shrewd wise people and
many fools. I was trying very hard to place myself among the wise
and shrewd ones. The Berners family I could not place in either of
these classifications and in particular Alonzo Berners puzzled and
disconcerted me.
Was there a force in life of which I knew nothing at all and was this
force exemplified in the person of the man I had picked up in a Chicago
saloon?
At night as I lay in my bed new ideas, new impulses, came flocking.
There was a man in the house with me, a man fairly worshiped by others
and for no reason I could understand but wanted to understand. His
very living in the house had done something to it, to the very wall of
the house, so that anyone coming into the place, sleeping between the
walls, was affected. Could it be that the man Alonzo Berners simply
loved the people about him and the places in which they lived and
had that love become a force in itself affecting the very air people
breathed? Sometimes in the afternoons when there was no one about I
went through the rooms of the house looking curiously about. There was
a chair here and a table there. On the table lay a book. Was there also
in the house a kind of fragrance? Why did the sunlight fall with such
a pronounced golden glory on the faded carpet on the floor of Alonzo
Berners’ room?
Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to
believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of
intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and in
others.
Was I afraid also of people who had the power of loving, of giving
themselves? Was I afraid of the power of unasking love in myself and in
others?
That I should be afraid of anything in the realm of the spirit, that
there should perhaps be a force in the world I did not understand,
could not understand, irritated me profoundly.
As the week advanced my irritation grew and I have never had any
doubt at all that Alonzo Berners knew of it. He said nothing and when
I went away he had nothing to say. I spent the days of that week in
his presence, saw the men who came to visit him and whom I thought I
understood well enough and then at night went to my bed and did not
sleep. I was like one tortured by a desire for conversion to something
like the love of God, by a desire to love and be loved and sometimes in
the night I lay in my bed like a very lovelorn maiden and sometimes I
grew angry and walked up and down in the moonlight in my room swearing
and shaking my fist at the shadows that flitted across the walls in the
moonlight.
It was two o’clock of the morning of one of the last nights I spent
in the house and I let myself out at the kitchen door and went for a
walk, going down along the hillside to the town and through the newer
town to the older place by the river. The moon was shining and all was
hushed and silent. What a quiet night! “I will give myself over to
these new impulses,” I thought, and so went along thinking thoughts
that had never before come into my head.
Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his way
up from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses had
gone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always been
drawn toward horses dogs and other animals and among people had cared
most for simple folk who made no pretense of having an intellect,
workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modern
life still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved the
play of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a force
outside themselves--they felt to be greater and more worthy than
themselves--women who gave themselves to physical experiences with
grave and fine abandon, all people in fact who lived for something
outside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for people
other than themselves, things over which they made no claim of
ownership.
Was I, who thought of myself as a young man having no morality now
face to face with a new morality? In the fifteenth century man had
discovered man. Had man later been lost to man? Was Alonzo Berners
simply one who loved his fellows and was he by that token stronger in
his weakness, more notable in his obscure Illinois village life than
all these great and powerful ones I had been following with my own mind
across the pages of history?
There was no doubt I was in a magnificent mood and that I enjoyed it
and when I got to the old town I went and stood by a small brick
building that had once been a residence but was now a cowshed. In a
near-by house a child cried and a man and a woman awoke from sleep and
talked for a time in low hushed voices. Two dogs came and discovered me
where I stood in the silence. As I remained unmoved they did not know
what to make of their discovery. At first they barked and then they
wagged their tails, and then, as I continued to ignore them, they went
away looking offended. “You are not treating us fairly,” they seemed to
be saying.
“And they are something like myself,” I thought, looking at the dusty
road on which the soft moonlight was falling and smiling at nothingness.
I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire to
abase myself before something not human and so stepping into the
moonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods having
been taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has been
taken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does not
understand but that is called the intellect, I kept smiling at the
figure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road and as I had smiled
at the figure I had cut in the Chicago saloon when I went with such an
outward show of indifference to the rescue of Alonzo Berners.
There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself
that I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in the
dust in the silence and no words came to my lips.
Did I worship merely the dust under my knees? There was the coincidence
as there is always the coincidence. The symbol flashed into my mind.
A child cried again in a near-by house and I presume some traditional
feeling come down from old tellers of tales took possession of me.
My fancy played with the figure of myself in the ridiculous position
into which I had got and I thought of the wise men of old times who
were reputed to have come to worship at the feet of another crying
babe in an obscure place. How grand! The wise men of an older time had
followed a star to a cowshed. Was I becoming wise? Smiling at myself
and with also a kind of contempt of myself and my own sentimentality I
half decided I would try to devote myself to something, give my life a
purpose. “Why not to another effort at the re-discovery of man by man?”
I thought rather grandly, getting up and beating the dust off my knees,
the while I continued the trick I had learned of pointing the laughing
finger of scorn at myself. I laughed at myself but all the time kept
thinking of the occasional flashes of laughter that came from the drawn
lips of Alonzo Berners. Why was his laughter freer and more filled with
joy than my own?