‘Sir?’ he said.
‘Sir what?’ his uncle said.
‘Yοu said something.’
‘Did I?’ his uncle said.
‘You said “less oft is peace”.’
‘Let’s hope not,’ his uncle said. ‘I don’t mean the peace, but the quotation. But then, suppose I did say it. What’s the good of Heidelberg or Cambridge or Jefferson High or Yoknapatawpha Consolidated, except to furnish a man a certain happy glibness with which to be used by his myriad tongues.’
So maybe he had been wrong. Perhaps his uncle had not lost that year after all, like the old golfer or wing-shot who, a little slack and off and even consistently missing shot after casual shot, can still bear down at last not even when the: pressure comes but merely when he wants to. Because almost before he had even had time to think that, his uncle said, striding on, glib, familiar, quick, incorrigibly garrulous, incorrigibly discursive, who had always something curiously truthful yet always a little bizarre to say about almost anything that didn’t really concern him:
‘No, we’ll let it stand. The least we can wish Captain Gualdres, the stranger in our midst, is that peace be not less oft or indeed not oft at all.’
Because by that time the whole county knew Captain Gualdres, by hearsay, and most of them even by sight. Then one day he, Charles, saw him too. Captain Gualdres was crossing the Square on one of the Harriss horses, and his, Charles’s, uncle said what it was. Not who the man was nor even what, but what they were, the man and the horse together: not a centaur, but a unicorn. He looked hard, not that flabby hardness of too much living which Harriss’s butlers had had, but the hardness of metal, of fine steel or bronze, desiccated, almost epicene.
And as soon as his uncle had said it, he, Charles, could see it too: the horse-creature out of the old poetry, with its single horn not of bone but of some metal so curious and durable and strange that even the wise men could not name it; some metal forged out of the very beginning of man’s dreams and desires and his fears too, and the formula lost or perhaps even deliberately destroyed by the Smith himself; something far older than steel or bronze and stronger than all the power for suffering and terror and death in mere gold or silver.
That was how, his uncle said, the man seemed a part of the horse he rode; that was the quality of the man who was a living part of the living horse: the composite creature might die, and would, and must, but only the horse would leave bones; in time the bones would crumble to dust and vanish into the earth, but the man would remain intact and impervious where they had lain.
But the man himself was all right. He spoke a hard, rigid sort of English that was not always clear in context, but he spoke it to everybody, anybody; soon he was not only known, but well known, not only in town but through the county too. Within a month or two he seemed to have been everywhere in the county that a horse could go; he must have known back roads and lanes and paths which even his, Charles’s, uncle, politicking the county yearly to hold his constituency together, probably had never seen.
He not only knew the county, he had made friends in it. Soon all sorts of people were going out there to see, not the Harrisses but the stranger; as guests not of the woman who owned the place and whose family name they had known all her life and her father’s and grandfather’s too, but of the stranger, the foreigner who six months ago they had never heard of and even a year later they would not be able to understand all he said; — out-of-doors men, usually bachelors: farmers, mechanics, a locomotive fireman, a civil engineer, two young men on the highway maintenance crew, a professional horse-and-mule trader — going out there on his invitation to ride the horses belonging to the woman who was his hostess known and whose lover (the whole county was convinced before they ever saw him that his interest, or at least intentions, was in the older woman, the mother, who already controlled the money, because he could have married the girl, the daughter, at any time, long before they left South America) he already probably was and whose husband he could be at any time he wished: — which would be when he finally had to, since, being not only a foreigner but a Latin too, he would have sprung from a long line of bachelor Don Juans and would be adulterous not even through preference but simply in the same way that a leopard is spotted.
In fact, it was presently said of him that if Mrs. Harriss had been a horse instead of a human, he would have married her at once long ago. Because it was soon realised that horses were his heart’s love just as drink or dope or gambling are other men’s.
The county heard how he would go to the stables alone at night, moon or dark, and saddle a half-dozen of them and ride them in relays into dawn and sunup; and that summer he built a steeplechase course in comparison to which that one Harriss had built was an obstacle race for crawling infants: sections of rail or wall not set into the fences but higher than the fences by a foot or two feet, not matchwood this time but solid beams capable of supporting roofs, not papier-mâché this time but the actual living rock freighted all the way from eastern Tennessee and Virginia.
And now many people from town too would go out there, because that was something to see: the man and the horse fusing, joining, becoming one beast, then passing on beyond even that point, that juncture: not daring, but testing, almost physically palping at that point where even at mutually-compounding ultimate, concorded at absolute’s uttermost, they must become violently two again, like the rocket pilot at his mach 1 then 2 then 3 and toward (himself and the machine) their own finitive apex where the iron craft explodes and vanishes, leaving his tender and naked flesh still hurtling forward on the other side of sound.
Though in this case (the man and the horse) the thing was in obverse. It was as if the man knew that he himself was invulnerable and unbreakable, and of their two, only the horse could fail, and that the man had laid out the course and built the jumps just to see where the horse must ultimately falter.
Which, by all the tenets of that agrarian and equestrian land, was exactly right; that was exactly the way to ride a horse; Rafe McCallum, one of his constant watchers, who had bred and raised and trained and sold horses all his life and who knew more about horses probably than any man in the country, said so: that when it was in the stall, treat it like it cost a thousand dollars; but when you were using it for something you had, or you and it both liked, to do, treat it like you could have bought ten like it for that many cents.
And one thing more happened or at least began about three months ago now, which the whole county had had to know about, or at least form an opinion about, for the very reason that this was the only phase or side of Captain Gualdres’ Mississippi life which he ever tried to keep, if not secret, at least private.
It had a horse in it of course because it had Captain Gualdres in it too. In fact, the county even knew specifically what horse. It was the one animal — or creature, including Captain Gualdres — in all those broad paneled manicured acres which didn’t belong even titularly to the Harrisses.
Because this one belonged to Captain Gualdres himself. He had bought it on his own selection and with his own money — or what he used for his own money: and the fact that he bought a horse with what the county believed was his mistress’s money was one of the best, perhaps the best North American stroke Captain Gualdres ever made or could have made. If he had used Mrs. Harriss’s money to buy himself a girl, which, being younger than Mrs. Harriss, they had expected all the time that sooner or later he would, the county’s contempt and disgust for him would have been exceeded only by their contempt and shame for Mrs. Harriss.
While, having decently spent her money for a horse, the county absolved him in advance by accepting the prima facie; he had gained a kind of male respectability by honorableness in adultery, fidelity and continence in pimphood; continuing (Captain
