NOTE XIII
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 rememberand 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 sucha 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 newertown 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 brickbuilding 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 traditionalfeeling 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?