Horses and Men quotes

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose.

The feet of Theodore are making a path, the heavy brutal feet.

They are tramping through the wilderness of lies, making a path. Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting, “Look at me.

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 horses for a man who owned a teaming and …

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.

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 …

… said, and there was the roots from that old stump sticking up like arms, and there was a watery smell, and the night was like—as if you could put your hand out and feel it—so warm and soft and dark and sweet like an orange.

I most cried and I most swore and I most jumped up and danced, I was so mad and happy and sad.

When Wilbur come back from being alone with his girl, and she saw him coming, Lucy she says, “we got to go to the train now,” and she was most crying too, but she never knew nothing I knew, and she couldn’t be so all …

“The yellow you have been using is a little muddy. The arm of this woman is not felt. In painting one should feel the arm of a woman. What I advise is that you change your palette. You have scattered too much. Pull it together.

A painting should stick together as a wet snow ball thrown by a boy clings to a wall.

”

No doubt I fully intended, from the first, to drop it. I had been doing the work of an artist.

Well, artists are always talking of destroying their own work but few do it, and those who do are perhaps the real heroes of life.

And so down into the mail box it went with a thud and my fortune was made.

“Either Lillian gave him the money or he stole it from Charley,” the men said, but nevertheless, and throwing moral standards aside, they went into the bar to buy drinks.

In Bidwell vice, while openly condemned, was in secret looked upon as a mark of virility in young manhood.

Frank and Will Edgley were teamsters and draymen like their father John and were hard working men. They owned their own teams and asked favors of no man and when they were not at work did not seek the society of others.

It was my idea, our going off together that way. When he told me he was in trouble his eyes looked so hurt I never thought of reputation or nothing. I just said I’d go and I been paid for it.

A girl always has to pay if she’s good to a man I suppose.

”

To herself, at such moments, May was like one sealed up in a vessel of glass.

The light of days came to her and from all sides came the sound of life going on but she herself did not live.

She but breathed, ate food, slept and awakened but what she wanted out of life seemed far away, lost to her. In a way, and ever since she had been conscious of herself, it had been so.

She imagined arms soft and yet firm, strong arms, holding her closely, and sank into a dim, splendid world of emotion.

The stream of life in which she had always wanted to float had picked her up—it carried her along.

All life became colorful. The red berries in the boxes—how red they were, the green of the vines, what a living green! The colors merged—they ran together, the stream of life was flowing over them, over her.

There was to be something warm, close, comforting, secure. Hands were to arise out of darkness and grasp her hands, her hands covered with the stain of red berries and the yellow dust of fields.

She was to be held closely in the warm place and then like a flower she was to break open, throw herself, her fragrance into the air.

What had been the matter with her, with her notion of life? May had asked herself that question a thousand times, had asked it until she was weary of asking, could not ask any more.

As the thoughts marched through May’s mind her small shoulders shook with sobs, but she was happy—strangely happy and something within herself was singing.

The singing was a song that was always alive somewhere in the world, it was the song of life, the song that crickets sang, the song the frogs croaked hoarsely.

It ran away out of her room, out of the darkness into the night, into days, into far lands—it was the old song, the sweet song.

“The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.” Someone had said that and others had felt what she now felt—they had had the feeling she could not put into words and they had tried putting it into words.

She was not alone in the world. It was not a strange path she walked in life, but many had walked it, many were walking it now.

Even as she sat in the window, thinking so strangely, many men and women in many places and many lands sat at other windows having the same thoughts.

She thought of May Edgley’s adventure in the wood with Jerome Hadley. How stupid her father had been, how stupid everyone in the town of Bidwell! “It must be so with men and women everywhere,” she thought vaguely. “

They go on thinking they know what’s happening, and they know nothing.

” She thought of May Edgley, small and a woman, alone in the forest with a man—a dark determined man, intent upon murder. The man held in his hand a little package containing a white powder.

Maud pictured him as the president of a great railroad system. She had never seen a railroad president but her father had often spoken of the president of the Nickle Plate and had described him as a big fine looking fellow.

What a thing is passion, so terrible, so strange. It takes such unimaginable turns.

The woman on the silken couch, the willowy serpentine woman, had turned from her husband, from the commander of men, from the strong man, the powerful one who swept all before him, and had given her illicit but powerfully fascinating love to a railroad mail …

And there they were, in the darkness. No more flashes of lightning came and it began to rain. It poured.

The rain came in torrents and the wind blew so that the trees seemed to be shouting to each other, calling to each other like friends lost in some dark pit.

There was plenty of shouting after that but neither May nor her father was afraid. They were perhaps too excited for fear to take hold of them. May didn’t know exactly how she felt. No words could describe how she felt.

Her hair had all fallen about her face. Well, she wasn’t afraid. The thing that had happened was too big to be afraid of. It was like being in the presence of God and one couldn’t be afraid. How could one?

A blade of grass isn’t afraid in the presence of the sun, coming up.

That’s the way May felt—little you see—a tiny thing in the vast night—nothing.

She would go—well, to a dance or to a house where many people had congregated to have a good time. She would move about, saying things, laughing, keeping everyone on tiptoes. What things her quick mind would make up to say!

Words would become little sharp swords with which she played.

How many pictures her mind had made of herself in the midst of such an assemblage.

Why did you put us down here? There is no rest. We are always being hurried about from place to place, to no end.

Millions of us live on the vast Chicago West Side, where all streets are equally ugly and where the streets go on and on forever, out of nowhere into nothing.

We are tired, tired! What is it all about? Why did you put us down here, mother of men?”

Could one make of one’s own hands a symbol of what the woman’s hands must have meant on that occasion, long ago, could not one make one’s own hands the humble servants to one’s soiled feet, to one’s soiled body?

It was a strange notion, this business of making oneself the keeper of the clean integrity of oneself.

When one was ill one got things a little distorted. In Tom’s room there was a tin wash-basin, and a pail of water, he himself brought each morning from the cistern at the back of the house.

He grew a little angry. “Well, then why did you drop me down here? Mothers should drop their children in places where men have learned a little to live.

Here there is only a desert of buildings.

”

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.

I would listen for a time to their talk and then their voices would seem to go far away. The things I was looking at would go far away too.

Perhaps there would be a tree, not more than a hundred yards away, and it would just come out of the ground and float away like a thistle.

It would get smaller and smaller, away off there in the sky, and then suddenly—bang, it would be back where it belonged, in the ground, and I would begin hearing the voices of the men talking again.

I’m only wondering. I’ve thought about it a lot since and I can’t make it out. I know I was never that way before that night and I know I’ve never been that way since.

Maybe it was lonesomeness, just lonesomeness, gone on in me too long.

I’ve often wondered if women generally are lonesomer than men.

I’m puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. I suppose, having undertaken to write this story, that’s what I’m up against, trying to do that.

I’m not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I’m just trying to make you understand some things about me, as I would like to understand some things about you, or anyone, if I had the chance.

Anyway the whole blamed thing, the thing that went on I mean in that little saloon on that rainy Saturday night, wasn’t like anything quite real.

… of the shadowy people and they in turn became involved in the fact of the hot uncomfortable room, in the fact that, although it was what the farmers of the Middle West call “good corn-growing weather” it was plain hell to be alive in Chicago.

Hand in hand the shadowy people of my fanciful world and myself groped our way through a forest in which the leaves had all been burned off the trees. The hot ground burned the shoes off our feet.

We were striving to make our way through the forest and into some cool beautiful city. The fact is, as you will clearly understand, I was a little off my head.

From the northwestern end of the city great hordes of men women and children had come to spend the night out of doors, by the shore of the lake. It was stifling hot there too and the air was heavy with a sense of struggle.

On a few hundred acres of flat land, that had formerly been a swamp, some two million people were fighting for the peace and quiet of sleep and not getting it.

Out of the half darkness, beyond the little strip of park land at the water’s edge, the huge empty houses of Chicago’s fashionable folk made a greyish-blue blot against the sky.

He grew bold and spoke to a woman who sat alone on a park bench. She let him sit beside her and, because it was dark and she was silent, he began to talk. The night had made him sentimental.

“Human beings are such hard things to get at. I wish I could get close to someone,” he said.

“Oh, you go on! What you doing? You ain’t trying to kid someone?” asked the woman.

It was all a matter—this business of man and woman—that did not touch him very closely—not yet. The matter of having a home—that was something else.

A home was something at a fellow’s back.

When one went off to work all week at some farm, and at night maybe went into a strange room to sleep, there was always the Appleton house—floating as it were, like a picture at the back of the mind—the Appleton house, and Kate moving …

Did her lips open and close, as though in an effort to say something to him, or was that an effect produced by the distant, uncertain and wavering light?

In the families of working people the dramatic and vital moments of life are passed over in silence.

Even in the moments of death and birth, little is said. A child is born to a laborer’s wife and he goes into the room.

He had been pushed out of the nest and that fact, the pushing of himself off the nest’s rim, was something accomplished.

The difficulty was that, while he was no longer a boy, he had not yet become a man. He was a thing swinging in space.

There was no place to put down his feet.

Men were like the pieces of iron in which holes had been bored—one pitched them aside into a box-like truck. One had nothing really to do with them. They had nothing to do with oneself.

Life became a procession of days and perhaps all life was just like that—just a procession of days.

Did one go out of one place and into another? Were youth and manhood two houses, in which one lived during different periods in life? It was evident something of importance must be about to happen to his sister Kate.

Will went to his boarding house and climbed the stairs wearily.

The devil—one might face anything if one but knew what was to be faced!

He turned on a light and sat down in his room on the edge of the bed, and the old cornet player pounced upon him, pounced like a little animal, lying under a bush along a path in a forest, and waiting for food.

He was a child as Will was too really, had always been such a child, would always be such a child. One need not be too afraid. Children were all about, everywhere.

If one were a child and lost in a vast, empty space, one could at least talk to some other child.

One could have conversations, understand perhaps something of the eternal childishness of oneself and others.

As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time, I imagine, a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding sort of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy.

In those dead flat Kansas towns lives have a way of getting ugly and messy without anything very definite having happened to make them so.

One can’t imagine the reasons—Let it go. It just is so and one can’t at all believe the writers of Western tales about the life out there.

Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too—in a way.

One got into a new world with new values, which after all is I suppose what poetry is all about.

There was the world of fact—we all know or think we know—the world of flat buildings and middle-western farms with wire fences about the fields and fordson tractors running up and down, and towns with high schools and advertising billboards, and everything that makes up …

The firm grip of my fingers on the thin paper of this cigarette is a sign that I am very quiet now. Sometimes it is not so.

When I am unquiet I am weak but when I am quiet, as I am now, I am very strong.

Just now I went along one of the streets of my city and in at a door and came up here, where I am now, lying on a bed and looking out at a window.

I could blow confusion away. I could blow a thousand people out through the roof of one tall building into the sky, into the unknown. Building after building I could consume, as I consume the cigarettes in this box.

I could throw the burning ends of cities over my shoulder and out through a window.

It is not often I get in the state I am now in—so quiet and sure of myself. When the feeling comes over me there is a directness and simplicity in me that makes me love myself.

I am on a couch by this window and I could ask a woman to come here to lie with me, or a man either for that matter.

I could take a row of houses standing on a street, tip them over, empty the people out of them, squeeze and compress all the people into one person and love that person.

Do you see this hand? Suppose it held a knife that could cut down through all the falseness in you. Suppose it could cut down through the sides of buildings and houses where thousands of people now lie asleep.

I am a tree that grows beside the wall. I have been thrusting up and up.

My body is covered with scars. My body is old but still I thrust upward, creeping toward the top of the wall.

It is my desire to drop blossoms and fruit over the wall.

My branches are creeping upward and new sap comes into me out of the dark ground under the wall.

My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall.

And now as to the life led by the man and woman in the large upper room in that old frame house. By a stroke of luck I have recently got rather a line on that by a discovery I have made.

Well, he had the notion that no one in the world could think or feel anything alone, and that people only got into trouble and walled themselves in by trying it, or something of the sort. There was a discord. Things were jangled.

Someone, it seems, had to strike a pitch that all voices could take up before the real song of life could begin.

Mind you I’m not putting forth any notions of my own.

The boy’s method was different.

He loved Bucephalus and the wicked animal loved him.

Tom slept on a cot in the barn and day or night, even when there were mares about, walked into Bucephalus’ box-stall without fear.

He was no longer the growing man but had become again the fine and sensitive boy who had driven Bucephalus through a mob of angry, determined men to victory. For the first time the blood of the old poet Twn O’r Nant awoke in him.

The water boy for the threshing crew rode the horse Pegasus down through the lanes back of the farm houses in Erie County, Ohio, to the creeks where the threshing tanks must be filled.

Beside him on the soft earth in the forest walked the young god Jesus. At the creek Pegasus, born of the springs of Ocean, stamped on the ground. The plodding farm horses stopped.

At the creek Pegasus, born of the springs of Ocean, stamped on the ground. The plodding farm horses stopped. With a dazed look in his eyes Tom Edwards arose from the wagon seat and prepared his hose and pump for filling the tank.

The god Jesus walked away over the land, and with a wave of his hand summoned the smiling days.

A light came into Tom Edwards’ eyes and grace seemed to come also into his heavy maturing body. New impulses came to him.

With a dazed look in his eyes Tom Edwards arose from the wagon seat and prepared his hose and pump for filling the tank. The god Jesus walked away over the land, and with a wave of his hand summoned the smiling days.

A light came into Tom Edwards’ eyes and grace seemed to come also into his heavy maturing body.

New impulses came to him. As the threshing crew went about, over the roads and through the villages from farm to farm, women and young girls looked at the young man and smiled.

In the road the young man, whose name was Paul, walked a little ahead of his companion and when they got to the barn each sought a separate place in the loft.

Each wanted to have thoughts into which he did not want the presence of the other to intrude.

For the first time Tom’s body burned with eager desire for a female. He lay where he could see out through a crack, in the side of the barn, and at first his thoughts were all about animals.

In a field young colts played about. As he held the apples and called softly they came timidly forward, stopping in alarm and then running a little forward, until one of them, bolder than the others, ate one of the apples out of his hand.

All through those bright warm clear fall days a restless feeling, it seemed to Tom ran through everything in nature.

In the clumps of woodland still standing on the farms flaming red spread itself out along the limbs of trees and there was one grove of young maple trees, near a barn, that was like a troop of girls, young girls who had walked together …