The point is that my friend had, at the moment, the feeling of having completely possessed the woman, and with that knowledge came also the knowledge that her husband would never possess her, could never by any chance possess her. A great tenderness swept over him and he had but one desire, to protect the woman, not to by any chance make the life she had yet to live any harder.
And so he ran quickly to the barn, secured the blanket and climbed silently up into the loft.
The farm hand with the drooping mustache was sleeping quietly on the hay and Tom lay down beside him and closed his eyes. As he expected the German came, almost at once, to the loft and flashed the lantern, not into the face of the older man but into Tom’s face. Then he went away and Tom lay awake smiling happily. He was young then and there was something proud and revengeful in him—in his attitude toward the German, at the moment. “Her husband knew, but at the same time did not know, that I had taken his woman from him,” he said to me when he told of the incident long afterward. “I don’t know why that made me so happy then, but it did. At the moment I thought I was happy only because we had both managed to escape, but now I know that wasn’t it.”
And it is quite sure my friend did have a sense of something. On the next morning when he went into the house the breakfast was on the table but the woman was not on hand to serve it. The food was on the table and the coffee on the stove and the three men ate in silence. And then Tom and the German stepped out of the house together, stepped, as by a prearranged plan into the barnyard. The German knew nothing—his wife had grown restless in the night and had got out of bed and walked out into the road and both the other men were asleep in the barn. He had never had any reason for suspecting her of anything at all and she was just the kind of woman he had wanted, never went traipsing off to town, didn’t spend a lot of money on clothes, was willing to do any kind of work, made no trouble. He wondered why he had taken such a sudden and violent dislike for his young employee.
Tom spoke first. “I think I’ll quit. I think I’d better be on my way,” he said. It was obvious his going, at just that time, would upset the plans the German had made for getting the work done at the rush time but he made no objection to Tom’s going and at once. Tom had arranged to work by the week and the German counted back to the Saturday before and tried to cheat a little. “I owe you for only one week, eh?” he said. One might as well get two days extra work out of the man without pay—if it were possible.
But Tom did not intend being defeated. “A week and four days,” he replied, purposely adding an extra day. “If you do not want to pay for the four days I’ll stay out the week.”
The German went into the house and got the money and Tom set off along the road.
When he had walked for two or three miles he stopped and went into a wood where he stayed all that day thinking of what had happened.
Perhaps he did not do much thinking. What he said, when he told the story that night in the Chicago park, was that all day there were certain figures marching through his mind and that he just sat down on a log and let them march. Did he have some notion that an impulse toward life in himself had come, and that it would not come again?
As he sat on the log there were the figures of his father and his dead mother and of several other people who had lived about the Ohio countryside where he had spent his boyhood. They kept doing things, saying things. It will be quite clear to my readers that I think my friend a story teller who for some reason has never been able to get his stories outside himself, as one might say, and that might of course explain the day in the wood. He himself thought he was in a sort of comatose state. He had not slept during the night before and, although he did not say as much, there was something a bit mysterious in the thing that had happened to him.
There was one thing he told me concerning that day of dreams that is curious. There appeared in his fancy, over and over again, the figure of a woman he had never seen in the flesh and has never seen since. At any rate it wasn’t the German’s wife, he declared.
“The figure was that of a woman but I could not tell her age,” he said. “She was walking away from me and was clad in a blue dress covered with black dots. Her figure was slender and looked strong but broken. That’s it. She was walking in a path in a country such as I had then never seen, have never seen, a country of very low hills and without trees. There was no grass either but only low bushes that came up to her knees. One might have thought it an Arctic country, where there is summer but for a few weeks each year. She had her sleeves rolled to her shoulders so that her slender arms showed, and had buried her face in the crook of her right arm. Her left arm hung like a broken thing, her legs were like broken things, her body was a broken thing.
“And yet, you see, she kept walking and walking, in the path, among the low bushes, over the barren little hills. She walked vigorously too. It seems impossible and a foolish thing to tell about but all day I sat in the woods on the stump and every time I closed my eyes I saw that woman walking thus, fairly rushing along, and yet, you see, she was all broken to pieces.”
The Man Who Became a Woman
* * *
MY father was a retail druggist in our town, out in Nebraska, which was so much like a thousand other towns I’ve been in since that there’s no use fooling around and taking up your time and mine trying to describe it.
Anyway I became a drug clerk and after father’s death the store was sold and mother took the money and went west, to her sister in California, giving me four hundred dollars with which to make my start in the world. I was only nineteen years old then.
I came to Chicago, where I worked as a drug clerk for a time, and then, as my health suddenly went back on me, perhaps because I was so sick of my lonely life in the city and of the sight and smell of the drug store, I decided to set out on what seemed to me then the great adventure and became for a time a tramp, working now and then, when I had no money, but spending all the time I could loafing around out of doors or riding up and down the land on freight trains and trying to see the world. I even did some stealing in lonely towns at night—once a pretty good suit of clothes that someone had left hanging out on a clothesline, and once some shoes out of a box in a freight car—but I was in constant terror of being caught and put into jail so realized that success as a thief was not for me.
The most delightful experience of that period of my life was when I once worked as a groom, or swipe, with race horses and it was during that time I met a young fellow of about my own age who has since become a writer of some prominence.
The young man of whom I now speak had gone into race track work as a groom, to bring a kind of flourish, a high spot, he used to say, into his life.
He was then unmarried and had not been successful as a writer. What I mean is he was free and I guess, with him as with me, there was something he liked about the people who hang about a race track, the touts, swipes, drivers, niggers and gamblers. You know what a gaudy undependable lot they are—if you’ve ever been around the tracks much—about the best liars I’ve ever seen, and not saving money or thinking about morals, like most druggists, dry-goods merchants and the others who used to be my father’s friends in our Nebraska town—and not bending the knee much either, or kowtowing to people, they thought must be grander or richer or more powerful than themselves.
What I mean is, they were an independent, go-to-the-devil, come-have-a-drink-of-whisky, kind of a crew and when one of them won a bet, “knocked ’em off,” we called it, his money was just dirt to him while it lasted. No king or president or soap manufacturer—gone on a trip with his family to Europe—could throw on more dog than one of them, with his big diamond rings and the diamond horse-shoe stuck in his necktie and all.
I liked the whole blamed lot pretty well and he did too.
He was groom temporarily for a pacing gelding named Lumpy Joe owned by a tall black-mustached man named Alfred Kreymborg and trying the best he could to make the bluff to himself he was a real one. It hap
pened that we were on the same circuit, doing the West Pennsylvania county fairs all that fall, and on fine evenings we spent a good deal of time walking and talking together.
Let us suppose it to be a Monday or Tuesday evening and our horses had been put away for the night. The racing didn’t start until later in the week, maybe Wednesday, usually. There was always a little place called a dining-hall, run mostly by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Associations of the towns, and we would go there to eat where we could get a pretty good meal for twenty-five cents. At least then we thought it pretty good.
I would manage it so that I sat beside this fellow, whose name was Tom Means and when we had got through eating we would go look at our two horses again and when we got there Lumpy Joe would be eating his hay in his box stall and Alfred Kreymborg would be standing there, pulling his mustache and looking as sad as a sick crane.
But he wasn’t really sad. “You two boys want to go down town to see the girls. I’m an old duffer and way past that myself. You go on along. I’ll be setting here anyway, and I’ll keep an eye on both the horses for you,” he would say.
So we would set off, going, not into the town to try to get in with some of the town girls, who might have taken up with us because we were strangers and race track fellows, but out into the country. Sometimes we got into a hilly country and there was a moon. The leaves were falling off the trees and lay in the road so that we kicked them up with the dust as we went along.
To tell the truth I suppose I got to love Tom Means, who was five years older than me, although I wouldn’t have dared say so, then. Americans are shy and timid about saying things like that and a man here don’t dare own up he loves another man, I’ve found out, and they are afraid to admit such feelings to themselves even. I guess they’re afraid it may be taken to mean something it don’t need to at all.
Anyway we walked along and some of the trees were already bare and looked like people standing solemnly beside the road and listening to what we had to say. Only I didn’t say much. Tom Means did most of the talking.
Sometimes we came back to the race track and it was late and the moon had gone down and it was dark. Then we often walked round and round the track, sometimes a dozen times, before we crawled into the hay to go to bed.
Tom talked always on two subjects, writing and race horses, but mostly about race horses. The quiet sounds about the race tracks and the smells of horses, and the things that go with horses, seemed to get him all excited. “Oh, hell, Herman Dudley,” he would burst out suddenly, “don’t go talking to me. I know what I think. I’ve been around more than you have and I’ve seen a world of people. There isn’t any man or woman, not even a fellow’s own mother, as fine as a horse, that is to say a thoroughbred horse.”
Sometimes he would go on like that a long time, speaking of people he had seen and their characteristics. He wanted to be a writer later and what he said was that when he came to be one he wanted to write the way a well bred horse runs or trots or paces. Whether he ever did it or not I can’t say. He has written a lot, but I’m not too good a judge of such things. Anyway I don’t think he has.
But when he got on the subject of horses he certainly was a darby. I would never have felt the way I finally got to feel about horses or enjoyed my stay among them half so much if it hadn’t been for him. Often he would go on talking for an hour maybe, speaking of horses’ bodies and of their minds and wills as though they were human beings. “Lord help us, Herman,” he would say, grabbing hold of my arm, “don’t it get you up in the throat? I say now, when a good one, like that Lumpy Joe I’m swiping, flattens himself at the head of the stretch and he’s coming, and you know he’s coming, and you know his heart’s sound, and he’s game, and you know he isn’t going to let himself get licked—don’t it get you Herman, don’t it get you like the old Harry?”
That’s the way he would talk, and then later, sometimes, he’d talk about writing and get himself all het up about that too. He had some notions about writing I’ve never got myself around to thinking much about but just the same maybe his talk, working in me, has led me to want to begin to write this story myself.
* * *
There was one experience of that time on the tracks that I am forced, by some feeling inside myself, to tell.
Well, I don’t know why but I’ve just got to. It will be kind of like confession is, I suppose, to a good Catholic, or maybe, better yet, like cleaning up the room you live in, if you are a bachelor, like I was for so long. The room gets pretty mussy and the bed not made some days and clothes and things thrown on the closet floor and maybe under the bed. And then you clean all up and put on new sheets, and then you take off all your clothes and get down on your hands and knees, and scrub the floor so clean you could eat bread off it, and then take a walk and come home after a while and your room smells sweet and you feel sweetened-up and better inside yourself too.
What I mean is, this story has been on my chest, and I’ve often dreamed about the happenings in it, even after I married Jessie and was happy. Sometimes I even screamed out at night and so I said to myself, “I’ll write the dang story,” and here goes.
Fall had come on and in the mornings now when we crept out of our blankets, spread out on the hay in the tiny lofts above the horse stalls, and put our heads out to look around, there was a white rime of frost on the ground. When we woke the horses woke too. You know how it is at the tracks—the little barn-like stalls with the tiny lofts above are all set along in a row and there are two doors to each stall, one coming up to a horse’s breast and then a top one, that is only closed at night and in bad weather.
In the mornings the upper door is swung open and fastened back and the horses put their heads out. There is the white rime on the grass over inside the grey oval the track makes. Usually there is some outfit that has six, ten or even twelve horses, and perhaps they have a negro cook who does his cooking at an open fire in the clear space before the row of stalls and he is at work now and the horses with their big fine eyes are looking about and whinnying, and a stallion looks out at the door of one of the stalls and sees a sweet-eyed mare looking at him and sends up his trumpet-call, and a man’s voice laughs, and there are no women anywhere in sight or no sign of one anywhere, and everyone feels like laughing and usually does.
It’s pretty fine but I didn’t know how fine it was until I got to know Tom Means and heard him talk about it all.
At the time the thing happened of which I am trying to tell now Tom was no longer with me. A week before his owner, Alfred Kreymborg, had taken his horse Lumpy Joe over into the Ohio Fair Circuit and I saw no more of Tom at the tracks.
There was a story going about the stalls that Lumpy Joe, a big rangy brown gelding, wasn’t really named Lumpy Joe at all, that he was a ringer who had made a fast record out in Iowa and up through the northwest country the year before, and that Kreymborg had picked him up and had kept him under wraps all winter and had brought him over into the Pennsylvania country under this new name and made a clean-up in the books.
I know nothing about that and never talked to Tom about it but anyway he, Lumpy Joe and Kreymborg were all gone now.
I suppose I’ll always remember those days, and Tom’s talk at night, and before that in the early September evenings how we sat around in front of the stalls, and Kreymborg sitting on an upturned feed box and pulling at his long black mustache and some times humming a little ditty one couldn’t catch the words of. It was something about a deep well and a little grey squirrel crawling up the sides of it, and he never laughed or smiled much but there was something in his solemn grey eyes, not quite a twinkle, something more delicate than that.
The others talked in low tones and Tom and I sat in silence. He never did his best talking except when he and I were alone.
For his sake—if he ever sees my story—I should mention that at the only big track we ever visited, at Readville, Pennsylvania, we saw old Pop Geers, the great racing driver, himself. His horses were at a p
lace far away across the tracks from where we were stabled. I suppose a man like him was likely to get the choice of all the good places for his horses.
We went over there one evening and stood about and there was Geers himself, sitting before one of the stalls on a box tapping the ground with a riding whip. They called him, around the tracks, “The silent man from Tennessee” and he was silent—that night anyway. All we did was to stand and look at him for maybe a half hour and then we went away and that night Tom talked better than I had ever heard him. He said that the ambition of his life was to wait until Pop Geers died and then write a book about him, and to show in the book that there was at least one American who never went nutty about getting rich or owning a big factory or being any other kind of a hell of a fellow. “He’s satisfied I think to sit around like that and wait until the big moments of his life come, when he heads a fast one into the stretch and then, darn his soul, he can give all of himself to the thing right in front of him,” Tom said, and then he was so worked up he began to blubber. We were walking along the fence on the inside of the tracks and it was dusk and, in some trees nearby, some birds, just sparrows maybe, were making a chirping sound, and you could hear insects singing and, where there was a little light, off to the west between some trees, motes were dancing in the air. Tom said that about Pop Geers, although I think he was thinking most about something he wanted to be himself and wasn’t, and then he went and stood by the fence and sort of blubbered and I began to blubber too, although I didn’t know what about.
But perhaps I did know, after all. I suppose Tom wanted to feel, when he became a writer, like he thought old Pop must feel when his horse swung around the upper turn, and there lay the stretch before him, and if he was going to get his horse home in front he had to do it right then. What Tom said was that any man had something in him that understands about a thing like that but that no woman ever did except up in her brain. He often got off things like that about women but I notice he later married one of them just the same.