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 rearranging 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 foot-loose 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 anticapitalistic 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 burn 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-live 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 sa
y 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.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 342