by Frank Norris
This story, however, is to be about a man who did this, but who was rewarded instead of punished. His name was Taggart, and it all came about through his falling foul of a hard-mouthed mare whose head stall lacked a lip strap.
I remember that the first time I ever saw Virginia Forsythe I said she looked as if she might have cantered right out from the pages of Scott, or from the frame of some old family portrait of the days of fox hunting and Squire Western.
She was in the saddle, riding down a country road at a very free hand gallop. The horse she was riding was her own — a clean-barrelled English thoroughbred named Conspirator, such as Leach used to draw, with an open gait, small pasterns, and closely docked tail. She rode wishbone style, with not too flowing divided skirts, finished off at the shoulders with a kind of postilion cape; and instead of the abominable high hat of convention, she had on her head a charming little centennial hat, tucked in at the sides to make it three-cornered, and set off with some sort of a pompon, or cockade thing, sticking up in front; and her manner of riding her mount was as though they twain had become one flesh; and the picture she made on her fine horse cantering so freely through a country lane against the blue haze of a California landscape, with a bit of green hedge running into the background and a strip of yellow rye in the middle distance, was very fetching and very pretty.
I suppose it was during one of these rides of hers in the country that young Taggart first saw her. Whether he fell in love with her then and there I do not know; certain it is that he at once hunted up some mutual friend and was introduced to her. When the things that make up this story happened, they had known each other for half of a season.
Virginia was wrapped up in her horse, and rode as naturally as other girls danced. She was in the saddle almost as soon as she was out of her crib, and in company with her father and brothers was riding to meets and jack-rabbit coursings with greyhounds at a time when Taggart was at home playing with his blocks and his rocking horse under the eye of his nurse.
The consequence was, that when she grew up she knew her horse thoroughly, and had all the collateral detail, as to chiffney, burr, and spade bits, shoes, toe weights, curbs, and snaffles, at her fingers’ ends. She wore a silver horseshoe in her cravat, and fastened her tennis belt with a cinch instead of a buckle.
After Taggart grew to know her better, he used to talk “horse” to her a good deal, as a subject she was interested in. He began, also, that policy, so especially dangerous as regards horses, of feigning a knowledge he had not, making remarks and comments on the subject with crass and cheerful ignorance. He kept this up until on one occasion Miss Forsythe brought up the subject of veterinary diseases.
Taggert knew about as much of the ills horseflesh is heir to as he did of the atomic theory of heat.
Virginia very sweetly told him that she was afraid her horse was threatened with strangles, on account of a sudden change from grass to dry feed, and asked him in case the larynx swelled if he would use fomentation with warm water and poulticing, or make the patient inhale the steam from a hot bran mash.
When he heard this, Taggart cleared his throat and stirred uneasily. Then he wrapped himself obscurely in a cloud of words, and behind that shelter slid away from the dangerous subject, as a squid darkens the water with his ink and steals away from his enemy under its cover. After this he walked more circumspectly and did not talk so much.
He had made very little progress in his relations with Virginia. For days and weeks he would be carefully, gradually leading, or rather luring, her to the desired point, only to have her at the very last moment shy off and bolt with the skittish terror of a yearling, after which the whole process would have to be begun over again. She was, he was obliged to admit, very harassing. Not only had he begun to disbelieve that she would ever care for him, but of late he even feared that she cared for someone else. He recognized for the first time the element of the Hated Rival as a potent factor in the existing order.
During the weeks immediately preceding Thanksgiving, it was quite the thing for Oakland people to drive or ride out to the university of a Wednesday or Friday afternoon, to watch the ‘varsity team practising for the football game on Thanksgiving Day. Taggart knew that Virginia and the Hated Rival often chanced to meet each other there, and the knowledge fretted and chafed him. As yet he had never accompanied Virginia on these particular afternoons, because he could not get away from the office. But the Hated Rival was a bondholder and a gentleman of leisure, and did precisely as he pleased. However, he did not ride; there was some consolation in that. On one occasion Taggart, in speaking of him to Virginia, said, “He is a good boy, but” — he shook his head and smiled— “he don’t know horse a little bit.”
Virginia had been out to the university a good deal of late, and Taggart thought that it was about time for him to do something. After considering the matter for a little while he concluded that it would be well if he rode out there himself — not with Virginia, but about an hour or so after her, and as it were happen upon her unexpectedly. Very probably the Hated Rival would be there; but he would have the satisfaction of forcing her to compare them with each other when he, being in the saddle, was in a more favourable condition. He could, too, in a certain way, very vaguely and distantly humiliate the Hated Rival by looking down upon him from the height of a horse’s back, for he knew that a man always appeared to advantage in that position. He reflected that all the heroes were represented as sitting upon horses. Besides, he could ride home with Virginia and leave the Hated Rival to cool his heels as best he might upon the common earth.
So the next afternoon that Virginia took her accustomed ride, Taggart cut the office, put on his riding boots and his very loose whipcord breeches, seized his crop, and went out to hire his horse. At the stable, during the saddling up, he walked around the animal, looking critically at its hoofs and teeth, and measuring the stirrup leathers with his arm. When he mounted he put his right foot into the stirrup first, and became very hot and confused when the stable boy corrected him.
Finally he swung himself up and pounded out of the cool, pungent gloom of the stable into the daylight outside.
The stable men stood at the door watching him go off, and one of them called after him something he did not catch, about “curb chain,”
“lip strap,” and “pulling a bit at first.” Taggart, though he did not understand, nodded his head, saying, “Thank you, I guess that will be all right,” and touched up the mare.
While in the town he rode slowly, trying to look as indifferent and as impassive as he could, but when he reached the fine roads in the suburbs he let the mare out a little, and pushed her into a gallop, which was her only gait.
Taggart did not like a gallop. He thought that good riding merely consisted in allowing no daylight to be seen betwixt rider and saddle, and when he was on a smooth, single-footing horse thought he knew how to ride; but a gallop threw him high of the saddle and made it hard for him to keep his stirrups.
He soon discovered that the mare was hard-bitted; the harder he pulled on the reins the more she wanted to go. She shied occasionally, and put back her ears, and grunted strangely. This made Taggart nervous; he thought her a very disagreeable horse, and pulled her down to a walk, experiencing a momentary pang of alarm at the difficulty of doing so.
The mare was having a very good time; she knew that Taggart did not know how to ride, from the way he felt her mouth, and from his neglect of gripping her with his knees. She began to feign to be high-spirited, and started away from things at which ordinarily she would not have lifted an ear; then she would pivot about on her hind legs, and go up the street sideways, and make Taggart feel unhappy; or else stop in her tracks till he touched her up, when she would suddenly start off with a fearful clatter of hoofs.
All this time she was pulling harder and harder, and poor Taggart’s fingers were becoming more and more numb. The perspiration came through his gloves and made the reins slippery and hard to grip.
&nb
sp; He reached Berkeley at last, and turned into Dana Street. As he did so an electric car came around the corner from Dwight Way, and the wheels moaned loudly against the rails as the car took the curve. The mare ran away when she heard this noise, getting off with an abruptness that nearly dislocated Taggart’s neck, and that brought his lower jaw against his upper with the force and alacrity of a steel trap.
She got a good start, because at the first jump she had thrown down her head and jerked the reins through his fingers. When his hold on the reins was gone, Taggart’s first impulse was to grab the mare’s flanks with his heels, which he should not have done because he was spurred, and because the gash of the steel made the mare ugly and drove her to run away in deadly earnest and with intent to kill. The trees and houses as they passed him began to resolve themselves into a streaked brownish blue, and he could hear himself shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” The mare’s hoofs as they clattered under her no longer sounded in the familiar marked and rhythmic cadence of a gallop, but made a noise like a watchman’s rattle that was disagreeable and ominous, and that turned him sick at the pit of his stomach. He was badly frightened, and his palate turned dry as a leather wedge in his throat.
It pains me to state that at this point of the affair Taggart was holding on to the horn of the saddle with both hands. He had lost one stirrup and was bounding about on the mare’s back like a kernel of popcorn in a hopper.
It unfortunately happened that it was in this condition he met Virginia. She had halted her horse by the curbstone, and the Hated Rival stood on the grass plat below talking to her. He caught a sudden glimpse of the two as they stood there, and then, as the unmistakable sounds of the gallop of a runaway horse met their ears, saw them start and look up quickly; then, as he flashed past, he beheld Virginia quickly wheel her horse into the middle of the street and start in pursuit of him.
In the three lengths the blazed forehead of Conspirator came forging out at his elbow. The mare was terrified at the sounds of the pursuer, and being foolish enough to believe that she could run away from a thoroughbred with the strains of half a dozen Derby winners in his veins, sheered off to one side with a fresh burst of speed. Conspirator closed up with his shoulder at her throat latch, and Virginia, leaning out until Taggart thought she must inevitably fall, caught the flying reins and passed them back to his hands; then she drew off and fell behind, and Taggart heard her shouting, “Turn him off! Turn him into the fence!” He let go of the saddle, and drew on the right hand rein with all his strength. The next moment he came down in a choking cloud of dust, amidst a noise of clattering hoofs and the splintering and crashing of fence palings. The mare stopped because she had run up against a board fence, and because her breast and fore legs were stuck full of pine splinters; but she was very angry with Taggart and was kicking at him savagely.
Taggart felt the ground under him and got upon his feet as Virginia and the Hated Rival came up. He did his best to be very game, and while he tried to steady his voice and keep his knee caps from jiggering up and down, said with a weak smile, “The horse is a vain thing for safety.” A little crowd gathered and looked at him while he brushed his clothes and listened to him telling Virginia and the Hated Rival how it happened. He was very much excited and stuttered as he spoke.
“Why!” said Virginia, after a while, “no wonder she pulled and got away from you; there is no lip strap to the curb — look!”
Taggart did not know what she meant. “Of course,” he said. “That’s it, no lip-pip strap.”
Virginia’s spurs jingled as she threw herself from her horse. She cut off the buckle-end of a thin bit of strap from the stirrup girth of her saddle, and fastened it around the mare’s nose just back of the bit.
“There,” she said, “that’s better than two or three curbs. You can hold her all right with that.”
It requires downright genuine courage to get upon a horse again after he has run away with you, and it was only the presence of the Hated Rival that nerved Taggart up to bestriding the mare once more. She started to run again instantly, but the army bridle checked her like a second fence, and after walking about a few minutes on two legs, she suddenly gave up and came to hand meekly as a kitten.
That evening, as Taggart lay poulticed and swathed on the sofa in his smoking room at home, wondering how soon he was going to die, and when Virginia and the Hated Rival were going to be married, the bell rang, and as the girl opened the front door he heard a voice that brought him up to a sitting posture immediately. He pulled off his bandages and limped into the parlour, and saw Virginia standing on the hearth rug there.
“Oh!” she cried. “I came to see your sister.”
“No,” said Taggart, with sudden and monstrous egotism, “no, that is not so; you came to see me — to see if I was hurt this afternoon,” which made Virginia flush hotly and become very angry, because it was the exact truth.
“But you didn’t seem to be much concerned about me this afternoon when the brute threw me,” said Taggart some hours later.
“Dick,” said Virginia reflectively (she was sitting on the arm of his chair), “Dick, you are a nice man, but” — she shook her head at him hopelessly— “you don’t know about horse a little bit.”
Overland Monthly, May, 1894.
OUTSIDE THE ZENANA
“Keep me ever from forgetting,
Though the sad-eyed poet sings
That the coronal of sorrows
Is remembering happier things.
E’en when present grief is sharpest,
Who would all the past destroy?
Let me still recall what has been:
Memory of joy is joy.”
Then he threw his hand sharply to the back of his head, sucking in his breath quickly between his teeth, with a little whistling gasp of pain. He used to do this very often, because he was not right in his mind and could not remember many things. Inside of his head there was coiled a clock spring, and during a great many days this would wind itself tighter and tighter, until it paused at its point of greatest tension. This would continue until he heard some sharp and sudden noise, like the banging of a door or a vigorous and prolonged hammering, and then the clock spring would be suddenly loosed, and would uncoil almost in an instant, buzzing and whirling fiercely, and he would burst into his song again, invariably breaking off at the same place, to gasp and clap his hand upon the back of his head.
Among the many things he could not remember was the air of the refrain of his song. This afflicted him poignantly. It was always eluding him, never within his reach, but just beyond it. One could observe him fighting for it through the murk of his insanity — in fact, he scarcely did anything else — rolling his head from side to side, his eyes closed, trying to beat out the time with his hand. But he never succeeded. The air of the verse up to a certain point he knew; beyond that it was a meaningless and intangible confusion of sounds. What made it worse was that he was a born musician and the song was one that he had composed himself.
Burr-Underwood was his name, and a certain vague connection with the Foreign Office had been his station in life, until he had written his opera, Guy Mannering, and had acquired greatness. Then he had gone to travel in the Far East, to collect material for his next opera, The Talisman, with Sintram, his librettist, and Sherrick Ovington, the artist.
It would have been better for Burr-Underwood if, as soon as he and Sintram had all their data well in hand, he had returned at once to civilization and had settled down to write his opera. But instead of that he had gone poking about all over India, seeing all sorts of things with all sorts of people, and had finally fetched up at Delhi, where they all three had friends. It was there Burr-Underwood’s affliction came upon him. It happened in this wise:
He borrowed a little racking, soap-coloured horse from a missionary acquaintance and left early one morning for an all-day’s ride to the tombs outside of the city. He returned about the middle of the afternoon, feet foremost, borne on a litter by a couple of natives.
The natives explained that they had found the sahib at the bottom of a dry ravine down which his horse had blundered. He was quite unconscious because of a dreadful bruise on the back of his skull, received either from the rocks he had fallen upon or from the hoofs of his horse. They did not know what had become of the horse. They had brought the sahib back to the city, and a native police at the gate had looked at the letters in his pockets and had told them where he lived. They were poor men, God knew, and they had left their olive presses idle for a whole day to bring him hither. The native police at the gate, who was several different kinds of an unclean dog without a name, had levied upon them an exorbitant toll as they passed through, and a donkey litter by the day cost so much; but they, the other sahibs, were protectors of the poor, as were also their fathers and mothers and a good many other of their relations for several generations back, and they knew that rupees would be forthcoming in true proportion to their loss of time and money.
Sintram and Ovington called in an army surgeon from an English regiment and patched up Burr-Underwood as best they could. But on the inside he would not come right. He was perplexed and confused and talked foolishness and laughed to himself. The bruise on the base of the skull combined with an overlong exposure to the noon sun had set him off upon a tangent of mild insanity, and nothing seemed able to bring him back to the normal circumference.
From his soft-voiced chatterings they guessed that he had gone out to the tombs to put to music a little song that Sintram had written for him the day before (he always liked to compose in the open air), and that, having written the score, he was returning home, humming it to himself, when his mount went over into the throat of the gully, and he fell, striking the back of his head. But besides this, in his wandering talk he spoke continually of a girl, a big girl, a European, with eyes like dark blue stars, whose face he said he had seen bending over him while he lay on the shore line between the ocean of the Void and the land of the Tangible; seeing but not knowing. The natives who had brought him in had made no mention of any such girl, so Sintram and his friend attached no great importance to what he said. The girl’s face was doubtless only one of many visions which chased one another across his brain. But he insisted upon connecting the loss of his song with this girl, often muttering that she had stolen it out of his head, and had put the clock spring in its place. He persisted so steadily in this story that Sintram at length concluded that possibly there might have been a girl in the affair. At all events, the written score of his song, which he maintained he was reading at the time of his fall, was gone.