New Lights on Broadway

It is queer how you can meet old familiar wayside acquaintances day after day, for weeks at a time, and then, suddenly, some little incident will pop out of the unexpected and reveal to you their whole personalities, setting, and responsibility to the universe.

I went down to mail a letter and get a paper, and walked back through the woods. I turned off the lane at a place that is n’t usual, going over the wall instead of through the legitimate gap and walking through wet wild asters and poison ivy, and by way of various outcroppings of rock, on which I sat down experimentally from time to time, to open my paper, combat the mosquitoes briefly, and withdraw. This departure from the path may have been the reason for the general change in the face of things, although I came back before long to the usual open spot, and found the usual two horses grazing there, went up the little hill past them and through the usual sagged place in their wire-fence. On the edge of the sunny open space on top of the hill, in the fringy edge of the sumach and the shade of a tree, with goldenrod adorning the prospect, I recognized the destined ledge of rock on which to read my paper; so I sat down to consider Cox and Harding in parallel columns.

Other voices not political began to get my attention, but I did n’t listen much. They were well away on the other side of the trees, and it was n’t my business. After a while the two horses came plunging out of the thicket and across the lower edge of the grassy space and into the thicket on the other side, shouts pursuing; and then a man in a whitish shirt and no-colored trousers, with a long stick in his hand, came after. He’d been ‘chasing those horses all morning, lady,’ he explained as he went by. ‘It’s hard to catch horses. You think you have them cornered and they get away from you.’

I wished him success this time, and thought he had it; but he had n’t. Then another man appeared — a long, lean man who left an impression of blue gingham shirt in the general color-effect of the landscape as he went across it. Had the horses gone up by here? he wanted to know. No, not up by here; they had gone down by here, I told him, with the other man after them, but they had n’t passed again. So he went off to beat the woods.

From that time my reading-room was the scene of crossings and recrossings, of pursuit, escape, bewilderment, of explosions of baffled wrath from the White Shirt and mild perplexity from the Blue Gingham. They ran across it, shouting; they walked across it, puzzled. They collapsed on it, to pant and rest. They called across it from opposite thickets to each other, to ask what luck. They stood in the middle of it and scratched their heads. And once in a long while, the horses crossed it — now a brown streak moving above the green leafage where the bushes were low, now cantering into the open, flicking their tails and having a very happy time.

They were n’t his horses, said the Blue Gingham. They were the other man’s. He just thought he’d give him a hand. The White Shirt had a great deal more to say. Not that he loitered to say it — in fact, he was generally running all the way across. But he somehow managed in passing to convey a great deal. He’d been after those horses since eight o’clock this morning, lady. He was tired out, running. He did n’t know when he’d been so tired. He was winded. He’d like to know where the devil those horses went. He was to bring them in this morning, and here it was eleven o’clock, and his folks were moving to-day and he had to go home. He did n’t know what he was going to do. Those horses were foxy. They were the coach-horses, and they’d always been here and knew every lane.

It had never occurred to me before to think of those horses as belonging to anyone. I had just thought of them as independent personalities roaming the woods at will — within the limitation of certain fences, perhaps; we all have our barriers somewhere. And here they were flooded with a whole new light, creatures of duties, subject to a foreman, a boss — to who knows what hierarchy of authority? — maybe to Her in the end. Here they were shown as unreliable, sly, selfish, lazy — no consideration for anybody’s comfort — no reasonableness — no gratitude — out on strike at present, for shorter hours and more time to eat, and who cares what becomes of the established social system! How little you really know the people you meet every day!

Well, White Shirt was winded. As he said, he’d been at it since eight o’clock this morning, and he was tired running all the time. He dropped on a stone under a tree. He mopped his face and his wide-open neck and chest. ‘ They ’ve nothing to do but run and eat,’ he said. ‘On our place you just hold out an apple and the horses’ll come right to you. We don’t ever tie the cows. Don’t have to. Milk them right out in the open field, and they’ll stand. Come right to you when you call them, and let down their milk. They know when it’s milking-time. If they were my horses,’ said White Shirt vindictively, ’I ’d put them to the plough. I’d work some of the fat off ’em. Work ’em eight hours a day. Then I guess they would n’t run! Keep ’em at it about two weeks!’

Once, for a long time, there was quiet, and I supposed the wicked were caught. But they were n’t. White Shirt reappeared with a paper-bag under his arm and a hunk of bread and an apple in one hand. I supposed it was lure, but it was really lunch.

‘It’s hard to have to eat while you run,’ he said. ‘Have those horses been by?’

No, they had n’t been by.

‘I’m going down that way,’ he said. ‘If they come along, will you just let me know, please?’

I would, willingly. But this time White Shirt did loiter. With one foot on my rock just above where it slanted out of the grass, he hung, poised, and we exchanged the stories of our lives. All the while he fancied himself gone down that way, hotfoot after his horses — mopped his brow at intervals and scarcely noticed that he was n’t running and winded. He offered me his apple, but I was afraid there was only one. I accepted the hospitality, but not the apple — and that was very noble of me, too, because it looked like a good one.

It was in Illinois that the farm was where the cows stood to be milked, and all you had to do was to hold out an apple and the horses would come. That was where he grew up.

‘They found us in the city,’ he said; ‘took us out there. I was seven years old, and there was my brother and my sister younger. Found us in New York City! My father and mother abandoned us. — No, never heard anything about them. Don’t know what became of them, or anything. I used to think — could n’t go to sleep at night. Up to the time I was married — up to the time I was thirty years old — I used to stay awake at nights wondering if I’d ever see my parents, and wishing I knew who they was and what they was like and what became of them. My brother done me out of three hundred dollars. That was eighteen years ago. I never saw him since. Yes, I often wished I knew about my father and my mother. Fifty years ago. Left us here in this city.’

Again he asked me to let him know, please, if the horses passed this way, and again imagined himself gone. He was pretty tired running after those horses. He’d been weeding the grass this morning and hurt his finger. ‘See!’ Mathematics applied to his story would seem to make him out fifty-seven, but he might have been five when he held out his grubby forefinger to show me the long red cut across it.

‘Cut it on a piece of wiregrass. It would n’t be so bad, but the place all seems so run down — lots of weeds and everything. I’ve only been on the place a week.’

He keeps acquainted with his sister. She never done him out of anything, I judge. She has a big farm in Illinois. It is the next farm to the one they grew up on, where the cows stand and the horses are friendly and acquainted. I suppose she had married the farm, but did n’t learn that, because he got interested in telling me about the butter.

He knows how to make butter without any buttermilk. There’s a little whey, but not any buttermilk at all. He made fifteen dollars once. Some people said he could n’t do it, and he said he’d show them, and they put up fifteen dollars, and he did do it. It’s his receipt. Usually you take a pound of cream and you don’t get a pound of butter out of it; but his way you get more than a pound. He knows all about raising vegetables — beans and tomatoes and corn and all the vegetables. You put in so much seed, and you get so many bushels back, and so many tomatoes to the plant; and so much money it’s worth and so much to the acre. Of course, he was n’t indefinite like that. He talked in figures; but I’m not an intelligent farmer as he is, so I don’t remember. But he does n’t forget it — not any of it. Twenty years ago, and he goes over it in his mind now — it’s like going to school again. He does n’t forget a thing about it.

He can make maple syrup, too. That’s another of his receipts. You put it on your cakes, and you’d say it was Vermont maple syrup. He’d give any man five dollars who could tell the difference. Nothing in it that would hurt you. It’s one kind of bark— he does n’t know whether it grows in these woods or not, but it’s a tree that grows back there. I took it that meant Illinois. You boil it in water and put in a chemical, and pebbles — that is, you strain it through pebbles and charcoal, and put in so much sugar to so much liquor, and when you get it the same color as the maple syrup — well — he’d give any man five dollars.

As I was going home, I met him down where the path goes over the wall. He called to me as soon as I came in sight, to know whether they’d been up there in my direction; but they had n’t He’d mended the fence down here, and he did n’t believe they could have got over — he wondered if they could. I did n’t believe they could, either, for the low place in the wall was so built up that I did n’t recognize it, and there are new barbed wires across, besides.

And all this in New York City, just off Broadway, and three blocks from the subway station!