NOTE X
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 itselfin 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 timethere, 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. Thenthe 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 broughtback 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 articlethey 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?