Chapter II: Introduction (1)

During the past year I have had occasion to think often and seriously of disintegration in American literature as a force which can no longer be ignored. There are times in the history of a people when disintegration is a form of creation, and when the cry goes up on all sides: “Écrasez l’Infame,” it is not generally recognized that this cry is a passionate prayer. Such a cry is heard in all countries of Europe today, though it is not yet general, and the question arises whether it is historically the moment for that cry or prayer to be uttered by American writers. Well, I do not think so at all, and yet the cry is usually synchronous with disintegration.

I do not think so because the disintegration which I see in American life and literature is the effect of weakness rather than of strong relentless force. It takes two forms in the work of our story writers. First of all, we have the disintegration of laziness and spiritual compromise which is manifest in the commercial short story’s surrender to the machine and to business. That is a present fact which can never be sufficiently taken into account. It follows the line of least resistance, and utters no cry of passionate conviction.

The second form of disintegration is often thought to be more subtle, but it is really equally obvious and weak. Those who manifest it are sitting home quietly observing the spiritual disintegration of Europe as a fascinating spectacle, and finding in it only æsthetic values which they long to imitate. They do not see, or perhaps they do not choose to see, that the pattern which they admire is the result of a conflict which they have shirked, and that any attempt to copy it without undergoing the experience which justifies it as expression will result only in pastiche, and in bad pastiche at that. Joyce and Lawrence and other Europeans are not accidents, but their American imitators may prove to be serious accidents. Joyce, who will serve very well to illustrate my point, is subduing the show of things to the desires of the mind, because he is a possessive European male who has suffered. Any one of many American writers whom I refrain from naming perceives the patterned result of this suffering, but is unable or unwilling to pay the price.

We are told in the Old Testament that Dada followed Babel as a penalty, and the European Dadaists have only sought, as critics of a civilization which has become a spiritual failure, to make this clear by symbols. The American Dadaists, who seem likely to spring up like mushrooms from now on, say “Dada” for its own sake, and so revert to infancy at the moment when men are most needed to interpret our obscure desires. I find their assumed superiority to other mortals snobbish, and their æsthetic attitude is only one present manifestation of the intellectualist sterility and anæmia from which we have begun to escape at last. They are taking “Art” entirely too seriously, and forgetting that every great artist is only great in so far as he can laugh at his own pretensions a little sadly.

We are also in some danger of seeking romantic escape from the machine by creating a mysticism of the machine, and by regarding the machine as something transcendental. This is sincere enough, because it is the result of action on the part of those who have suffered from the machine. We know how deeply rooted is the instinct to lay propitiatory offerings before something powerful of which we are afraid. But the artist should not imitate Caliban, even if he does so beautifully, and so while I recognize the truth underlying the work of Stieglitz, for example, I cannot accept this new transcendentalism in American art and literature as a liberating force. It is clear to me that it is really an ostrichlike way of accepting slavery.

These remarks are perhaps less irrelevant to the general reader than he is likely to believe. If our more promising artists are driven into a cul-de-sac, it is because they perceive the banality of Main Street, and are seeking a way out into the country. It is perhaps necessary to continue trying cul-de-sacs until the right road has been found, and it may even be probable that when that road is found, many artists will not be disinterested enough to bring back the news. The romantic escape of many is perhaps necessary for the realistic return of one, and all I am seeking to do is to point out if I can what ways appear to me to be cul-de-sacs, and what artists seem to have stumbled on the way out. If these artists run away, something is lost, but more is lost if they are all driven into narrow cul-de-sacs. Meanwhile, Sherwood Anderson seems to me the man who is nearest to finding freedom, and I believe he is also the man who is most anxious to return to Main Street and report what he has found.

To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists, may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead. What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh, living current which flows through the best American work, and the psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have conferred upon it.

No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display at present.

The present record covers the period from October, 1921, to September, 1922, inclusive. During this period I have sought to select from the stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. Substance is something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a story only attain substantial embodiment when the artist’s power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth. The first test of a short story, therefore, in any qualitative analysis is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts or incidents. This test may be conveniently called the test of substance.

But a second test is necessary if the story is to take rank above other stories. The true artist will seek to shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skillful selection and arrangement of his materials, and by the most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.

The short stories which I have examined in this study, as in previous years, have fallen naturally into four groups. The first consists of those stories which fail, in my opinion, to survive either the test of substance or the test of form. These stories are listed in the yearbook without comment or qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of those stories which may fairly claim that they survive either the test of substance or the test of form. Each of these stories may claim to possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, I am glad to say, a persuasive sense of life in them to which a reader responds with some part of his own experience. Stories included in this group are indicated in the yearbook index by a single asterisk prefixed to the title.

The third group, which is composed of stories of still greater distinction, includes such narratives as may lay convincing claim to a second reading, because each of them has survived both tests, the test of substance and the test of form. Stories included in this group are indicated in the yearbook index by two asterisks prefixed to the title.

Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which possess, I believe, the even finer distinction of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with such sincerity that these stories may fairly claim a position in American literature. If all of these stories by American authors were republished, they would not occupy more space than six or seven novels of average length. My selection of them does not imply the critical belief that they are great stories. A year which produced one great story would be an exceptional one. It is simply to be taken as meaning that I have found the equivalent of six or seven volumes worthy of republication among all the stories published during the period under consideration. These stories are indicated in the yearbook index by three asterisks prefixed to the title, and are listed in the special “Roll of Honor.” In compiling these lists I have permitted no personal preference or prejudice consciously to influence my judgment. It has been a point of honor with me not to republish a story by an English author or by any foreign author. I have also made it a rule not to include more than one story by an individual author in the volume. The general and particular results of my study will be found explained and carefully detailed in the supplementary part of the volume.

EDWARD J. O’BRIEN.

Forest Hill, Oxon, England,
November 23, 1922.

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1922

Note.--The order in which the stories in this volume are printed is not intended as an indication of their comparative excellence; the arrangement is alphabetical by authors.

THE DARK CITY[2]

By CONRAD AIKEN

(From _The Dial_)

His greatest pleasure in life came always at dusk. Its prelude was the reading of the evening paper in the train that took him out of the city. By long association the very unfolding of the grimy ink-smelling sheets was part of the ritual: his dark eyes dilated, he felt himself begin to “grin,” the staggering load of business detail, under which he had struggled all day in the office, was instantly forgotten. He read rapidly, devoured with rapacious eyes column after column--New York, London, Paris, Lisbon--wars, revolutions, bargains in umbrellas, exhibitions of water colors. This consumed three-quarters of the journey. After that he watched the procession of houses, walls, trees, reeling past in the mellow slant light, and began already to feel his garden about him. He observed the flight of the train unconsciously, and it was almost automatically, at the unrealized sight of a certain group of trees, oddly leaning away from each other, like a group of ballet dancers expressing an extravagance of horror, that he rose and approached the door.

The sense of escape was instant. Sky and earth generously took him, the train fled shrieking into the vague bright infinity of afternoon. The last faint wail of it, as it plunged into a tunnel, always seemed to him to curl about his head like a white tentacle, too weak to be taken seriously. Then, in the abrupt silence, he began climbing the long hill that led to his house. He walked swiftly, blowing tattered blue clouds of smoke over his shoulders, revolving in his mind the items of news amusing enough to be reported to Hilda; such as that Miss Green, the stenographer, who had for some time been manifesting a disposition to flirt with him, today, just after closing, when everybody else had gone out, had come to him, blushing, and asked him to fasten the sleeve of her dress. A delicious scene! He smiled about the stem of his pipe, but exchanged his smile for a laugh when, looking in through a gap in his neighbor’s hedge, he found himself staring into the depraved eyes of a goat. This would add itself to the episode of Miss Green, for these eyes were precisely hers. He turned the corner and saw his house before him, riding on the hill like a small ship on a long green wave. The three children were playing a wild game of croquet, shrieking. Louder sounds arose at his appearance, and as he strode across the lawn they danced about him chattering and quarreling.

“Daddy, Martha won’t play in her turn, and I say--”

“Marjorie takes the heavy mallet--”

The chorus rose shrill about him, but he laughed and went into the house, shouting only, “Out of the way! I’m in a hurry! The beans are dying, the tomatoes are clamoring for me, the peas are holding out their hands!”

“Daddy says the beans are dying. Isn’t he silly?”

“Let’s get to the garden before daddy does.”

As he closed the door he heard the shrieks trailing off round the corner of the house, diminuendo. He hung up coat and hat with a rapid gesture and hurried to the kitchen. Hilda, stirring the cocoa with a long spoon, looked round at him laconically.

“Chocolate!” he shouted, and pulled a cake of chocolate out of his pocket. He was astonished, he rolled his eyes, for it appeared to have been sat upon--“in the train.” Hilda shrieked with laughter. He thrust it into her apron pocket and fled up the stairs to change.

He could not find his old flannel trousers. Not in the cupboard--not in the bureau. He surrendered to an impulse to comic rage. “Not under the bed!” he cried. He thrust his head out of the window that overlooked the garden and addressed his children.

“Martha! Bring my trousers here this instant!”

He drew in his head again from the shower of replies that flew up at him like missiles and going to the door roared down to his wife.

“I’ve lost my trousers!”

Then he found them in the closet behind the door and, laughing, put them on.

II

He ran out of the side door, under the wistaria-covered trellis, and down the slippery stone steps to the vegetable garden.

“Here comes daddy, now,” shrilled to him from Martha.

He lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and stood in profound meditation before the orderly, dignified, and extraordinarily vigorous rows of beans. They were in blossom--bees were tumbling the delicate lilac-pink little hoods. Clouds of fragrance came up from them. The crickets were beginning to tune up for the evening. The sun was poised above the black water tower on the far hill.

Martha and Marjorie began giggling mysteriously behind the lilacs.

“My hoe!” he wailed.

The hoe was thrust out from behind the lilacs.

“If anybody should drive up in a scarlet taxi,” he said to Martha, accepting the hoe, “and inform you that your soul is free, don’t believe him. Tell him he’s a liar. Point me out to him as a symbol of the abject slavery that all life is. Say that I’m a miserable thrall to wife, children, and beans--particularly beans. I spend my days on my knees before my beans.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Martha.

He held his hoe under his arm and walked solemnly among the beans. The two girls followed him.

“Here’s a caterpillar, daddy!”

“Kill him!”

“Here’s another--a funny green one with red sparkles on his back. Oh, look at him!”

“Don’t look at him! Kill him!”

“He squirts out like green tooth-paste.”

“Don’t, Martha!” he cried, pained. “Don’t say such things! Spare your neurotic father.”

He shrank visibly and strode off to the corner where his peas were planted and started methodically hoeing the rows, turning the rich loam up about the pale stalks. Now and again a pebble clinked, he stooped and threw it off into the meadow. Mary, the youngest, came to the top of the steps and cried. Martha and Marjorie went to her, and he forgot them. The rising and falling of the hoe-blade, shiny with much polishing in the brown soil, hypnotized him, and his thoughts fell into a sort of rhythm, came and went without his interference. “Ridiculous!” he thought, “that this solemn singular biped, whom other bipeds for convenience call Andrew, should stand here with a stick and scratch the skin of this aged planet. What does he expect to get for it? It pleases the aged planet. She stretches herself in the twilight, purrs like an old cat, and expresses her pleasure in the odd and useful effluvium we call peas. And this biped wears clothes. Think of it! He wears clothes; things made out of plant-fibre and sheep’s wool cunningly and hideously made to fit his arms and legs. He has in his pocket--a small pouch made in these singular garments--a watch, a small shiny round object in which he has reduced to feeble but regular iambics the majestic motions of the sun, earth and stars. He takes it out and looks at it with an air of comprehension and puts it back again. Why doesn’t he laugh at himself?”... He chuckled.... “This object tells him that he has time for two more rows before dinner. Clink, clink. Damn these pebbles. My antediluvian anthropoid ape of an ancestor had to walk round them, they were so huge. He sat on them, cracked nuts against them, chattered with his family. He had no watch, and his trousers grew like grass.... Thank the Lord they’ve become pebbles.”

He sighed, and for a moment rested his chin on the hoe-handle, peering out towards the tree-encircled swamp. The hylas were beginning to jingle their elfin bells. A red-winged blackbird sailed in the last sunlight from one apple-tree to another.

“All a vicious circle--and all fascinating. Utterly preposterous and futile, but fascinating.”

He dropped the hoe and trundled the wheelbarrow to the edge of the strawberry-bed.

“Why can’t you stay where you’re put?” he said. “Why do you grow all over the place like this?”

With a trowel he began digging up the runners and placing them on the wheelbarrow. It delighted him to part the soft cool soil with his fingers, to thrust them sensitively among the finely filamented roots. The delicate snap, subterranean, of rootlets gave him a delicious pang. “Blood flows--but it’s all for the best; in the best of all possible worlds. Yield to me, strawberries, and you shall bear. I am the resurrection and the life.” When he had a sufficient pile of plants, he trundled the wheelbarrow to the new bed, exquisitely prepared, rich, warm, inviting. With the hoe he made a series of holes, and then, stooping, thrust the hairy roots back into the earth, pressing the soil tenderly about them. Then he rose, stretched his back, and lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and enshrining the flame, which danced, in the hollow of his stained hands. The cloud of smoke went up like incense.

“Water!” he cried. “Water! Water!”

Martha appeared, after a moment, bringing the watering-pot. She held it in front of her with both hands.

“Quick, Martha, before they die. Their tongues are turning black.”

“Silly!” Martha replied.

The earth about each plant was darkened with the tilted water, and the soiled leaves and stems were brightened.

“Listen, daddy! They’re smacking their lips.”

“They are pale, they have their eyes shut, they are reaching desperately down into the darkness for something to hold on to. They grope and tickle at atoms of soil, they shrink away from pebbles, they sigh and relax.”

“When the dew falls, they’ll sing.”

“Ha! ha! what fools we are.”

He flung the hoe across the wheelbarrow and started wheeling it towards the toolhouse.

“Bring the watering-pot.”

Martha ran after him and put it in the wheelbarrow.

“That’s right--add to my burden--never do anything that you can make somebody else do.”

Martha giggled in response and skipped towards the house. When she reached the stone steps she put her feet close together and with dark seriousness hopped up step after step in that manner. He watched her and smiled.

“O Lord, Lord,” he said, “what a circus we are.”

He trundled the bumping wheelbarrow and whistled. The red sun, enormous in the slight haze, was gashing itself cruelly on a black pine tree. The hylas, by now, had burst into full shrill-sweet chorus in the swamp, and of the birds all but a few scraping grackles were still. “Peace--peace--peace,” sang the hylas, a thousand at once. Silver bells, frailer than thimbles, ringing under a still and infinite sea of ether.... “Peace--peace,” he murmured. Then he dropped the wheelbarrow in horror, and put his hands to his ears. “The enemy!” he cried. “Martha! hurry! Martha!” This time Martha seemed to be out of earshot, so he was obliged to circumvent the enemy with great caution. The enemy was a toad who sat by preference near the toolhouse door: obese, sage, and wrinkled like a Chinese god. “Toad that under cold stone.” Marvelous compulsion of rhythm.... He thrust the wheelbarrow into the cool pleasant-smelling darkness of the toolhouse, and walked towards the kitchen door, which just at that moment Hilda opened.

“Hurry up,” she said. Her voice had a delicious mildness in the still air and added curiously to his already overwhelming sense of luxury. He had, for a moment, an extraordinarily satisfying sense of space.

III

He lifted his eyes from the pudding to the Hokusai print over the mantel.

“Think of it with shame! We sit here again grossly feeding our insatiable bellies, while Fujiyama, there, thrusts his copper-colored cone into a cobalt sky among whipped-cream clouds! Pilgrims, in the dusk, toil up his sides with staves. Pilgrims like ants. They struggle upwards in the darkness for pure love of beauty.”

“I don’t like bread-pudding,” ejaculated Mary solemnly, “it’s beany.”

Martha and Marjorie joined in a silvery cascade of giggles.

“Where _did_ she get that awful word!” said Hilda.

“Tom says it, mother.”

“Well, for goodness’ sake forget it.”

Mary stared gravely about the table, spoon in mouth, and then, removing the spoon, repeated, “It’s beany.”

He groaned, folding his napkin.

“What an awful affliction a family is. Why did we marry, Hilda? Life is a trap.”

“Mrs. Ferguson called this afternoon and presented me with a basket of green strawberries. I’m afraid she thought I wasn’t very appreciative. I hate to be interrupted when I’m sewing. Why under the sun does she pick them before they’re ripe?”

“That’s a nice way to treat a neighbor who gives you a present!... You _are_ an ungrateful creature.”

Hilda was languid.

“Well, I didn’t ask her for them.”

Her eyes gleamed with a slow provocative amusement.

“They’re beany,” said Mary.

He rolled his eyes at Mary.

“Our kids are too much with us. Bib and spoon,
Feeding and spanking, we lay waste our powers!”

They all pushed back their chairs, laughing, and a moment later, as he lighted his cigar, he heard, from the music-room, Hilda’s violin begin with tremulous thin notes, oddly analogous to the sound of her voice when she sang, playing Bach to a methodical loud piano accompaniment by Martha. Melancholy came like a blue wave out of the dusk, lifted him, and broke slowly and deliciously over him. He stood for a moment, made motionless by the exquisite, intricate melody, stared, as if seeking with his eyes for the meaning of the silvery algebra of sound, and then went out.

The sun had set, darkness was at hand. He walked to the top of the stone steps and looked across the shallow valley towards the fading hill and the black water-tower. The trees on the crest, sharply silhouetted against a last band of pale light, looked like marching men. Lights winked at the base of the hill. And now, as hill and water-tower and trees became obscure, he began to see once more the dim phantasmal outlines of the dark city, the city submerged under the infinite sea, the city not inhabited by mortals. Immense, sinister and black, old and cold as the moon, were the walls that surrounded it. No gate gave entrance to it. Of a paler stone were the houses upon houses, tiers upon tiers of shadowy towers, which surmounted the walls. Not a light was to be seen in it, not a motion: it was still. He stared and stared at it, following with strained eyes the faint lines which might indicate its unlighted streets, seeking in vain, as always, to discover in the walls of it any sign of any window. It grew darker, it faded, a profound and vast secret, an inscrutable mystery.

“She is older than the rocks,” he murmured.

He turned away and walked over the lawn in the darkness, listening to the hylas, who seemed now to be saturating the hushed night with sound. “Peace--peace--peace--” they sang. _Pax vobiscum._ He gathered the croquet mallets and leaned them against the elm tree, swearing when he tripped over an unseen wicket. This done, he walked down the pale road, blowing clouds of smoke above him with uplifted face, and luxuriated in the sight of the dark tops of trees motionless against the stars. A soft skipping sound in the leaves at the road’s edge made him jump. He laughed to himself.... “He had no watch, and his trousers grew like grass....” He took out his watch and peered closely at it. The children were in bed, and Hilda was waiting for a game of chess. He walked back with his hands deep in his pockets. Pawn to king-four.

“Hilda! Wake up!”

Hilda opened her candid eyes without astonishment and sat up over the chess-board, on which the tiny men were already arranged.

“Goodness! How you scared me. What took you so long? I’ve been dreaming about Bluebeard.”

“Bluebeard! Good Heavens! I hope he didn’t look like me.”

“He did--remarkably!”

“A _nice_ thing to say to your husband.... Move! Hurry up!... I’m going to capture your king. Queens die young and fair.”

He smoked his pipe. Hilda played morosely. Delicious, she was when she was half asleep like this! She leaned her head on one hand, her elbow on the table.... When she had been checkmated at the end of half an hour she sank back wearily in her chair. She looked at him intently for a moment and began to smile.

“And how about the dark city tonight?” she asked. He took slow puffs at his pipe and stared meditatively at the ceiling.

“Ah--the dark city, Hilda! The city submerged under an infinite sea, the city not inhabited by mortals!... It was there again--would you believe it?... It was there.... I went out to the stone steps, smoking my cigar, while you played Bach. I hardly dared to look--I watched the hill out of the corner of my eyes and pretended to be listening to the music.... And suddenly, at the right moment of dusk, just after the street lamps had winked along the base of the hill, I saw it. The hill that we see there in the daylight, with its water-tower and marching trees, its green sloping fields and brook that flashes in the sun, is unreal, an illusion, the thinnest of disguises--a cloak of green velvet which the dark city throws over itself at the coming of the first ray of light.... I saw it distinctly. Immense, smooth and black, old and cold as the moon, are the walls that surround it. No gate gives entrance to it. Of a paler stone are the houses upon houses, tiers upon tiers of shadowy towers that surmount those sepulchral walls. No motion was perceptible there--no light gleamed there--no sound, no whisper rose from it. I thought: perhaps it is a city of the dead. The walls of it have no windows, and its inhabitants must be blind.... And then I seemed to see it more closely, in a twilight which appeared to be its own, and this closer perception gave way in turn to a vision. For first I saw that all the walls of it are moist, dripping, slippery, as if it were bathed in a deathlike dew; and then I saw its people. Its people are maggots--maggots of perhaps the size of human children; their heads are small and wedge-shaped, and glow with a faint bluish light. Masses of them swarm within those walls. Masses of them pour through the streets, glisten on the buttresses and parapets. They are intelligent. What horrible feast is it that nightly they celebrate there in silence? On what carrion do they feed? It is the universe that they devour; and they build above it, as they devour it, their dark city like a hollow tomb.... Extraordinary that this city, which seen from here at dusk has so supernatural a beauty, should hide at the core so vile a secret....”

Hilda stared at him.

“Really, Andrew, I think you’re going mad.”

“Going? I’m gone! My brain is maggoty.”

They laughed and rattled the chessmen into their wooden box. Then they began locking the doors and windows for the night.

[2] Copyright, 1922, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.
Copyright, 1923, by Conrad Aiken.

I’M A FOOL[3]

By SHERWOOD ANDERSON

(From _The Dial_ and _The London Mercury_)

It was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to face. And it all came about through my own foolishness too. Even yet, sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or kick myself. Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be a kind of satisfaction in making myself look cheap by telling of it.

It began at three o’clock one October afternoon as I sat in the grand stand at the fall trotting and pacing meet at Sandusky, Ohio.

To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be sitting in the grand stand at all. During the summer before I had left my home town with Harry Whitehead and, with a nigger named Burt, had taken a job as swipe with one of the two horses Harry was campaigning through the fall race meets that year. Mother cried and my sister Mildred, who wanted to get a job as a school teacher in our town that fall, stormed and scolded about the house all during the week before I left. They both thought it something disgraceful that one of our family should take a place as a swipe with race horses. I’ve an idea Mildred thought my taking the place would stand in the way of her getting the job she’d been working so long for.

But after all I had to work and there was no other work to be got. A big lumbering fellow of nineteen couldn’t just hang around the house and I had got too big to mow people’s lawns and sell newspapers. Little chaps who could get next to people’s sympathies by their sizes were always getting jobs away from me. There was one fellow who kept saying to everyone who wanted a lawn mowed or a cistern cleaned, that he was saving money to work his way through college, and I used to lay awake nights thinking up ways to injure him without being found out. I kept thinking of wagons running over him and bricks falling on his head as he walked along the street. But never mind him.

I got the place with Harry and I liked Burt fine. We got along splendid together. He was a big nigger with a lazy sprawling body and soft kind eyes, and when it came to a fight he could hit like Jack Johnson. He had Bucephalus, a big black pacing stallion that could do 2.09 or 2.10 if he had to, and I had a little gelding named Doctor Fritz that never lost a race all fall when Harry wanted him to win.

We set out from home late in July in a box car with the two horses and after that, until late November, we kept moving along to the race meets and the fairs. It was a peachy time for me, I’ll say that. Sometimes, now, I think that boys who are raised regular in houses, and never have a fine nigger like Burt for best friend, and go to high schools and college, and never steal anything or get drunk a little, or learn to swear from fellows who know how, or come walking up in front of a grand stand in their shirt sleeves and with dirty horsey pants on when the races are going on and the grand stand is full of people all dressed up-- What’s the use talking about it? Such fellows don’t know nothing at all. They’ve never had no opportunity.

But I did. Burt taught me how to rub down a horse and put the bandages on after a race and steam a horse out and a lot of valuable things for any man to know. He could wrap a bandage on a horse’s leg so smooth that if it had been the same color you would think it was his skin, and I guess he’d have been a big driver too and got to the top like Murphy and Walter Cox and the others if he hadn’t been black.

Gee whizz, it was fun. You got to a county seat town maybe, say, on a Saturday or Sunday, and the fair began the next Tuesday and lasted until Friday afternoon. Doctor Fritz would be, say, in the 2.25 trot on Tuesday afternoon and on Thursday afternoon Bucephalus would knock ’em cold in the “free-for-all” pace. It left you a lot of time to hang around and listen to horse talk, and see Burt knock some yap cold that got too gay, and you’d find out about horses and men and pick up a lot of stuff you could use all the rest of your life if you had some sense and salted down what you heard and felt and saw.

And then at the end of the week when the race meet was over, and Harry had run home to tend up to his livery stable business, you and Burt hitched the two horses to carts and drove slow and steady across country to the place for the next meeting so as to not over-heat the horses, etc., etc., you know.

Gee whizz, gosh amighty, the nice hickorynut and beechnut and oaks and other kinds of trees along the roads, all brown and red, and the good smells, and Burt singing a song that was called Deep River, and the country girls at the windows of houses and everything. You can stick your colleges up your nose for all me. I guess I know where I got my education.

Why, one of those little burgs of towns you come to on the way, say now, on a Saturday afternoon, and Burt says, “let’s lay up here.” And you did.

And you took the horses to a livery stable and fed them and you got your good clothes out of a box and put them on.

And the town was full of farmers gaping, because they could see you were race horse people, and the kids maybe never see a nigger before and was afraid and run away when the two of us walked down their main street.

And that was before prohibition and all that foolishness, and so you went into a saloon, the two of you, and all the yaps come and stood around, and there was always someone pretended he was horsey and knew things and spoke up and began asking questions, and all you did was to lie and lie all you could about what horses you had, and I said I owned them, and then some fellow said, “Will you have a drink of whiskey?” and Burt knocked his eye out the way he could say, offhand like, “Oh, well, all right, I’m agreeable to a little nip. I’ll split a quart with you.” Gee whizz.

But that isn’t what I want to tell my story about. We got home late in November and I promised mother I’d quit the race horses for good. There’s a lot of things you’ve got to promise a mother because she don’t know any better.

And so, there not being any work in our town any more than when I left there to go to the races, I went off to Sandusky and got a pretty good place taking care of the horses for a man who owned a teaming and delivery and storage business there. It was a pretty good place with good eats and a day off each week and sleeping on a cot in the big barn, and mostly just shoveling in hay and oats to a lot of big good-enough skates of horses that couldn’t have trotted a race with a toad. I wasn’t dissatisfied and I could send money home.

And then, as I started to tell you, the fall races come to Sandusky and I got the day off and I went. I left the job at noon and had on my good clothes and my new brown derby hat I’d just bought the Saturday before, and a stand-up collar.

First of all I went downtown and walked about with the dudes. I’ve always thought to myself, “put up a good front,” and so I did it. I had forty dollars in my pocket and so I went into the West House, a big hotel, and walked up to the cigar stand. “Give me three twenty-five cent cigars,” I said. There was a lot of horse men and strangers and dressed-up people from other towns standing around in the lobby and in the bar, and I mingled amongst them. In the bar there was a fellow with a cane and a Windsor tie on, that it made me sick to look at him. I like a man to be a man and dress up, but not to go put on that kind of airs. So I pushed him aside, kind of rough, and had me a drink of whiskey. And then he looked at me as though he thought maybe he’d get gay, but he changed his mind and didn’t say anything. And then I had another drink of whiskey, just to show him something, and went out and had a hack out to the races all to myself, and when I got there I bought myself the best seat I could get up in the grand stand, but didn’t go in for any of these boxes. That’s putting on too many airs.

And so there I was, sitting up in the grand stand as gay as you please and looking down on the swipes coming out with their horses and with their dirty horsey pants on and the horse blankets swung over their shoulders same as I had been doing all the year before. I liked one thing about the same as the other, sitting up there and feeling grand and being down there and looking up at the yaps and feeling grander and more important too. One thing’s about as good as another if you take it just right. I’ve often said that.

Well, right in front of me, in the grand stand that day, there was a fellow with a couple of girls and they was about my age. The young fellow was a nice guy all right. He was the kind maybe that goes to college and then comes to be a lawyer or maybe a newspaper editor or something like that, but he wasn’t stuck on himself. There are some of that kind are all right and he was one of the ones.

He had his sister with him and another girl and the sister looked around over his shoulder, accidental at first, not intending to start anything--she wasn’t that kind--and her eyes and mine happened to meet.

You know how it is. Gee, she was a peach. She had on a soft dress, kind of a blue stuff and it looked carelessly made, but was well sewed and made and everything. I knew that much. I blushed when she looked right at me and so did she. She was the nicest girl I’ve ever seen in my life. She wasn’t stuck on herself and she could talk proper grammar without being like a school teacher or something like that. What I mean is, she was O.K. I think maybe her father was well-to-do, but not rich to make her chesty because she was his daughter, as some are. Maybe he owned a drug store or a dry goods store in their home town, or something like that. She never told me and I never asked.

My own people are all O.K. too, when you come to that. My grandfather was Welsh and over in the old country, in Wales he was--but never mind that.

* * * * *

The first heat of the first race come off and the young fellow setting there with the two girls left them and went down to make a bet. I knew what he was up to, but he didn’t talk big and noisy and let everyone around know he was a sport, as some do. He wasn’t that kind. Well, he come back and I heard him tell the two girls what horse he’d bet on, and when the heat was trotted they all half got to their feet and acted in the excited, sweaty way people do when they’ve got money down on a race, and the horse they bet on is up there pretty close at the end, and they think maybe he’ll come on with a rush, but he never does because he hasn’t got the old juice in him, come right down to it.

And then, pretty soon, the horses came out for the 2.18 pace and there was a horse in it I knew. He was a horse Bob French had in his string, but Bob didn’t own him. He was a horse owned by a Mr. Mathers down at Marietta, Ohio.

This Mr. Mathers had a lot of money and owned some coal mines or something, and he had a swell place out in the country, and he was stuck on race horses, but was a Presbyterian or something, and I think more than likely his wife was one, too, maybe a stiffer one than himself. So he never raced his horses hisself, and the story round the Ohio race tracks was that when one of his horses got ready to go to the races he turned him over to Bob French and pretended to his wife he was sold.

So Bob had the horses and he did pretty much as he pleased and you can’t blame Bob, at least, I never did. Sometimes he was out to win and sometimes he wasn’t. I never cared much about that when I was swiping a horse. What I did want to know was that my horse had the speed and could go out in front if you wanted him to.

And, as I’m telling you, there was Bob in this race with one of Mr. Mathers’ horses, was named “About Ben Ahem” or something like that, and was fast as a streak. He was a gelding and had a mark of 2.21, but could step in .08 or .09.

Because when Burt and I were out, as I’ve told you, the year before, there was a nigger Burt knew, worked for Mr. Mathers, and we went out there one day when we didn’t have no race on at the Marietta Fair and our boss Harry was gone home.

And so everyone was gone to the fair but just this one nigger, and he took us all through Mr. Mathers’ swell house and he and Burt tapped a bottle of wine Mr. Mathers had hid in his bedroom, back in a closet, without his wife knowing, and he showed us this Ahem horse. Burt was always stuck on being a driver, but didn’t have much chance to get to the top, being a nigger, and he and the other nigger gulped that whole bottle of wine and Burt got a little lit up.

So the nigger let Burt take this About Ben Ahem and step him a mile in a track Mr. Mathers had all to himself, right there on the farm. And Mr. Mathers had one child, a daughter, kinda sick and not very good looking, and she came home and we had to hustle and get About Ben Ahem stuck back in the barn.

I’m only telling you to get everything straight. At Sandusky, that afternoon I was at the fair, this young fellow with the two girls was fussed, being with the girls and losing his bet. You know how a fellow is that way. One of them was his girl and the other his sister. I had figured that out.

“Gee whizz,” I says to myself, “I’m going to give him the dope.”

He was mighty nice when I touched him on the shoulder. He and the girls were nice to me right from the start and clear to the end. I’m not blaming them.

And so he leaned back and I gave him the dope on About Ben Ahem. “Don’t bet a cent on this first heat because he’ll go like an oxen hitched to a plough, but when the first heat is over go right down and lay on your pile.” That’s what I told him.

Well, I never saw a fellow treat any one sweller. There was a fat man sitting beside the little girl that had looked at me twice by this time, and I at her, and both blushing, and what did he do but have the nerve to turn and ask the fat man to get up and change places with me so I could set with his crowd.

Gee whizz, amighty. There I was. What a chump I was to go and get gay up there in the West House bar, and just because that dude was standing there with a cane and that kind of a necktie on, to go and get all balled up and drink that whiskey, just to show off.

Of course she would know, me setting right beside her and letting her smell of my breath. I could have kicked myself right down out of that grand stand and all around that race track and made a faster record than most of the skates of horses they had there that year.

Because that girl wasn’t any mutt of a girl. What wouldn’t I have give right then for a stick of chewing gum to chew, or a lozenger, or some licorice, or most anything. I was glad I had those twenty-five cent cigars in my pocket, and right away I give that fellow one and lit one myself. Then that fat man got up and we changed places and there I was plunked right down beside her.

They introduced themselves, and the fellow’s best girl he had with him, was named Miss Elinor Woodbury, and her father was a manufacturer of barrels from a place called Tiffin, Ohio. And the fellow himself was named Wilbur Wessen and his sister was Miss Lucy Wessen.

I suppose it was their having such swell names got me off my trolley. A fellow, just because he has been a swipe with a race horse, and works taking care of horses for a man in the teaming, delivery and storage business, isn’t any better or worse than any one else. I’ve often thought that, and said it, too.

But you know how a fellow is. There’s something in that kind of nice clothes, and the kind of nice eyes she had, and the way she had looked at me, awhile before, over her brother’s shoulder, and me looking back at her, and both of us blushing.

I couldn’t show her up for a boob, could I?

I made a fool of myself, that’s what I did. I said my name was Walter Mathers from Marietta, Ohio, and then I told all three of them the smashingest lie you ever heard. What I said was that my father owned the horse About Ben Ahem, and that he had let him out to this Bob French for racing purposes, because our family was proud and had never gone into racing that way, in our own name, I mean. Then I had got started and they were all leaning over and listening, and Miss Lucy Wessen’s eyes were shining, and I went the whole hog.

I told about our place down at Marietta, and about the big stables and the grand brick house we had on a hill, up above the Ohio River, but I knew enough not to do it in no bragging way. What I did was to start things and then let them drag the rest out of me. I acted just as reluctant to tell as I could. Our family hasn’t got any barrel factory, and, since I’ve known us, we’ve always been pretty poor, but not asking anything of anyone at that, and my grandfather, over in Wales--but never mind that.

We set there talking like we had known each other for years and years, and I went and told them that my father had been expecting maybe this Bob French wasn’t on the square, and had sent me up to Sandusky on the sly to find out what I could.

And I bluffed it through I had found out all about the 2.18 pace in which About Ben Ahem was to start.

I said he would lose the first heat by pacing like a lame cow and then he would come back and skin ’em alive after that. And to back up what I said I took thirty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to Mr. Wilbur Wessen and asked him would he mind, after the first heat, to go down and place it on About Ben Ahem for whatever odds he could get. What I said was that I didn’t want Bob French to see me and none of the swipes.

Sure enough the first heat come off and About Ben Ahem went off his stride, up the back stretch, and looked like a wooden horse or a sick one, and come in to be last. Then this Wilbur Wessen went down to the betting place under the grand stand and there I was with the two girls, and when that Miss Woodbury was looking the other way once, Lucy Wessen kinda, with her shoulder you know, kinda touched me. Not just tucking down, I don’t mean. You know how a woman can do. They get close, but not getting gay either. You know what they do. Gee whizz.

And then they give me a jolt. What they had done when I didn’t know, was to get together, and they had decided Wilbur Wessen would bet fifty dollars, and the two girls had gone and put in ten dollars each of their own money, too. I was sick then, but I was sicker later.

About the gelding, About Ben Ahem, and their winning their money, I wasn’t worried a lot about that. It come out O.K. Ahem stepped the next three heats like a bushel of spoiled eggs going to market before they could be found out, and Wilbur Wessen had got nine to two for the money. There was something else eating at me.

Because Wilbur come back after he had bet the money, and after that he spent most of his time talking to that Miss Woodbury, and Lucy Wessen and I was left alone together like on a desert island. Gee, if I’d only been on the square or if there had been any way of getting myself on the square. There ain’t any Walter Mathers, like I said to her and them, and there hasn’t ever been one, but if there was, I bet I’d go to Marietta, Ohio, and shoot him tomorrow.

There I was, big boob that I am. Pretty soon the race was over, and Wilbur had gone down and collected our money, and we had a hack downtown, and he stood us a swell dinner at the West House, and a bottle of champagne beside.

And I was with that girl and she wasn’t saying much, and I wasn’t saying much either. One thing I know. She wasn’t stuck on me because of the lie about my father being rich and all that. There’s a way you know.... Craps amighty. There’s a kind of girl you see just once in your life, and if you don’t get busy and make hay then you’re gone for good and all and might as well go jump off a bridge. They give you a look from inside of them somewhere, and it ain’t no vamping, and what it means is--you want that girl to be your wife, and you want nice things around her like flowers and swell clothes, and you want her to have the kids you’re going to have, and you want good music played and no ragtime. Gee whizz.