Chapter X: Part 10

I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as the poet Gray lived his.

* * * * *

I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.

Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....

On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup of excellent, hot, strong coffee.

Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.

The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.

It was hardly dawn when he woke me....

A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his wife was with us, working, too.

When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence.

He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His whole life and pleasure was senseless work.

And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the old religious classics. Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, Baxter's _Saint's Rest_, Blair, _On the Grave_ ... Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance--Keats had read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ... I thought back to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas jail.

But now old Sowerby read nothing. "I have no time left for a book."

I never met the old man's equal for parsimony. "The last man--the man who worked for me before you came--he was a Pole, who could hardly speak English. He left because he didn't like the food ... yes, that was what he had the impudence to announce ... and you can see that I am not so bad ... don't I give you a slice of jelly roll with your beans, every other night?"

I assented to what the old man said. He had been the milkman to the Emerson and Thoreau families, and, in that capacity, had known both the great men. And I was more eager to hear what he had to say about them, than to draw wages for my work.

But he had little to say about them, except that they were as great fools as the outside world esteemed them great men.

"They talked a lot about work and a man's being independent, earning his living with his own hands, from the soil, but,--did they follow their teachings?... that's the test....

"And I saw them, often, strolling out a-field together, talking and talking a lot of nonsense about philosophy, and going on, regardless, across their neighbours' crops."

And that was the only information I could get of these famous men from their milkman.

* * * * *

Sowerby kept pigs under the barn.... For economy's sake the cows' dung was shovelled down to them. And over them the outhouse was also built, so that our human efforts might not be wasted....

* * * * *

One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight.

On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the plain disgust of the horses and cows.

I asked him if anything was the matter. I learned that he had risen in the middle of the night and gone to work ... because that was his happiness, his only happiness.

* * * * *

Driven by an impulse of distaste for him and his house and market garden, I started to leave in secret. What money was coming to me for my two weeks' work I did not care about--in the face of the curious satisfaction it would give me just to quit, and to have the old man call up to me and find me missing....

I heard him pottering back to his bedroom again.... I waited till he was quiet and back to sleep--then I stole forth in the quiet moonlight near dawn.

It gave me a pleasure to vanish like smoke. I thought of the time when I had that job plowing in Southern California; that time I had driven the horses to the further end of the field, and left them standing there under the shade of a tree and then made off, wishing to shout and sing for the sheer happiness of freedom from responsibility and regular work.

Each time I have made off that way, from a multitude of varying employments, it has not been, surely, to the detriment of my successive employers. I have always decamped with wages still owing me.

* * * * *

I swung a scythe for a week for another Yankee farmer, on a marsh where the machine couldn't be driven in--which I was informed was King Phillip's battle ground.

* * * * *

I visited the inn where Longfellow was supposed to have gotten his inspiration for _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.

I must see all the literary landmarks, even those where I considered the authors that had caused the places to be celebrated, as dull and third rate....

* * * * *

With gathering power in me grew my desire to attend college. I would tramp, as I was doing, through the country, and end up at some western university for the fall term.

* * * * *

The art workers' community lay in my way at Eos.

I dropped off a freight, one morning, in the Eos yards....

The gladdest to see me again was the Buddhist, Pfeiler. He rushed up to me, in the dining hall, that night, and took both my hands in his ... thanking me for my kind thought of him in sending him my Ossian ... avowing that he had made a mistake in his opinion of me and asking my indulgence ... for he was old and a failure ... and I was young and could still look forward to success.

My unexpected dropping-in at Eos created quite a stir.

Spalton welcomed me back, and stood, that evening, before the fire in the sitting room, with his arm about my shoulder ... even as he did so I remembered the picture taken of him and the celebrated poet L'Estrange, together ... their arms about each other's shoulders ... and the current Eos proverb, that Spalton always quarrelled not long after with anyone about whose shoulder he first cast his arm.

* * * * *

Already a change was manifest in the little community. Tabled off by themselves sat the workers and the folk of the studios, that night. While the guests who stayed at the inn occupied separate tables.

And there were many secret complaints about a woman they referred to as "Dorothy" ... Dorothy had done this ... Dorothy had done that ... Dorothy would be the ruination of "the shop" ... it would have been better if she had never shown up at the Eos Studios....

I asked who was Dorothy....

"Don't you know ... we thought you did ... Spalton's new wife ... the one his first wife got a divorce from him for?"

And I heard the story, part of which I knew, but not the final details.

Spalton's first wife had been an easy-going, amiable creature ... fair and pretty in a soft, female way ... a teacher in the local Sunday school ... one who accepted all the conventions as they were ... who could not understand anyone not conforming to them ... life was easier and more comfortable that way....

Spalton's originality and genius would in the end have of itself produced a rupture between them ... few women are at home with genius, much as they clasp their hands in ecstasy over it, as viewed on the lecture and concert platform....

But the wedge that drove them apart was entered when his first wife, Anne, brought into their married life, Dorothy, a fellow teacher, a visiting friend.

Dorothy was so thin as to be stringy of body. She had a sharp hatchet-face, eyes with the colour of ice in them ... a cold, blue-grey.

She was a woman of culture, yet at the same time she was possessed of a great instinct for organisation and business enterprise--just what was needed for the kind of thing Spalton was trying to inaugurate at Eos. She fell in readily with the Master's schemes ... even with his price-tags on objects of art, his egregious overvaluation of hand illumined books ... which his wife, with old-fashioned honesty, rebuked him for.

An affinity of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense, homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form can never attain.

There was a local busybody of a minister, and it was he who first intimated to the then Mrs. Spalton that her dear and intimate friend, was betraying her....

There followed the usual spying and publicity ... Mrs. Spalton won her divorce....

* * * * *

But this was after several years. Long before the divorce was granted John and Dorothy were aware of a tangible fruit of their love.... I had often wondered why the Master so ardently, so often, wrote eloquently in defense of the superior qualities of illegitimate children....

Dorothy bore their child ... a girl ... and went away to teach in a smart school somewhere in the East, under an assumed name....

Now, after many years, Spalton and she married.

* * * * *

I saw in the sitting room a wonderful girl. She had shining, abundant hair, and a face rendered superlatively beautiful by the glowing of vivacity, understanding, feminine vitality behind it and through it, like a lamp held up within. She was absorbed in the new exhibit of Gresham's that hung on the walls of the guest room ... she wore a short, bouncing, riding skirt, and carried a quirt in her hand.

I walked up to her, fascinated. Without letting her know who I was I quoted Poe's _To Helen_ to her. She stood, smiling sweetly, as if it were the most usual thing in the world, to have a lean, wild-faced stranger address her with a poem.

"That's the way I feel about you!" I ended.

She gave a lovely laugh ... held out both her hands, dropping the quirt on the floor ... took my hands and leaned back gaily, like a child.

"Oh, I know who you are ... you're Razorre ... father wrote me a lot about you ... when I lived East ... you were one of his pet 'nuts'!"

We sat there and conversed a long time. She talked of Socrates and Plato as if she had broken bread with them ... she discussed science, history, art as if wisdom and understanding were nearer her desire than anything else....

She was the child of "John" and Dorothy.

* * * * *

Again Spalton asked me to stay, "we need a poet for Eos!"

But I insisted that I must go on and acquire a college education ... which he maintained would be a hindrance, not a help--"they will iron you out, and make you a decent member of society--and then, Razorre, God help the poet in you ... poets and artists should never be decent ... only the true son of Ishmael can ever write or paint," he waved.

* * * * *

There came to the artworkers one day a young Southern woman, a six months' widow ... she was gentle and lily-coloured and lovely. She had great, swimming, blue eyes, a sensitive red bow of a mouth ... and the lashes of her eyes lay far down on her cheeks. She was the first woman I had met who approximated my poet's ideal of what a woman should be.

I was working for Spalton during my stay, which I meant to make a brief one. I was shovelling coal for him, and firing a furnace.

Wash as I might, I could not remove a faint blackness that clung to the edges of my eyes. This made my eyes glow and seem larger than they were. On such an extraneous and whimsical exterior circumstance hinged the young widow's interest in me.

And I decided that I'd stay a little longer at the Eos Studios ... all winter, if she stayed all winter. And I no longer asked for an easier job. For I wanted my eyes to remain large-seeming, since, half in jest, she admired their present appearance.

She manifested a close and affectionate friendship for me, and all day long all I thought of, as I kept the furnace going, was the evening after dinner, when I could sit close by her reading poetry in a low voice to her.

I leaned over her on every pretext to smell her hair,--her body, through her low-necked dress--to breathe in giddily that delicate fragrance that emanates from the bodies of beautiful women, as perfume from flowers.

Once, in spite of my timidity, I dared place my arm about her shoulders, there in the dark. There was a lecture on over in the "chapel" and mostly everybody had gone to it. Spalton, in passing through where we sat together, asked her if she was coming. "No, she was too tired." She remained sitting by me. Spalton shot me a glance of scarcely concealed resentment and went on. We were left alone.

She began telling me of her deceased husband ... of their devotion to each other ... she applied a dainty thing of lace to her eyes, pausing a moment....

"John? may I call you by your name, not by the odious name they have for you here?..."

She leaned her head against my shoulder.

"Johnnie, you are a fine, sensitive soul, and I know you'll be a great poet some day ... but why don't these people take you more seriously?

"I think it must be your childlikeness ... and your spirit of horse-play, that breaks through at the most inopportune moments, that encourages these fools to treat you with levity."...

"Dear woman," I began, "dearest woman," and my throat bunched queerly so that I could not speak further.

She stroked my hair....

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-three."

"I am just a year younger."

"May I kiss you?" I asked, stumblingly.

"Yes, Johnnie, you may kiss me"....

"Why, you dear child, you ... you kiss just like a small boy ..." in a lower voice, "can it be possible that you, with all your tramping, your knowledge of life in books, of people?--"

I bent my head, ashamed, silently acknowledging my inexperience of women.

"No, it's nothing to be ashamed of, dearest boy ... I think you are a fine man--to have gone through what you have--and still--"

Her voice trailed off. She put her arm around my neck, drew me to her, and kissed me!

* * * * *

As we sat close together, a brooding silence. Then, with a transition of thought to the practical, she remarked....

"I'm angry with these people ... they over-charge for everything."

"Just think of it--I--I feel I may speak of it to you ... we seem to have come so near to each other to-night--"

"They brought my laundry back yesterday, and for one piece of silk lingerie I was charged--guess?"

I couldn't imagine how much.

"Seventy-five cents--think of that!"

* * * * *

As the Eoites came tramping back from the lecture, they found us still seated there. At the first footstep we had swiftly moved apart.

I had been half-reclining, my head in her lap, strangely soothed and happy as she ran her fingers through my hair. For a long time neither of us had said a word.

Now I sat apart from her, awkward and wooden.

Spalton did not speak, inclined his head icily, as he strode by.

"He's mad because I didn't come to his talk," she whispered.

"I see my finish," I replied.

* * * * *

Now, Spalton was as much in love with Dorothy, his second wife, as I have ever known a man to be in love with a woman. But that could not entirely exclude his jealousy over my sympathetic relation with the "Southern Lady," as the artworkers termed her. And he feared for her on another score. She was, to use a constantly recurring phrase of the Master's, whenever he wished to describe anyone as being wealthy, "lousy with money," and he suspected, not without good cause, that I would warn her against paying exorbitant prices for books and objects of art....

* * * * *

One night I was the cause of an accident which gave him a handle to seize on.

We were having a musicale. A new musician had come to Eos. The former Eos musician, Von Hammer, the father of the prodigy who played the piano, had quarrelled with the Master and had retired to Buffalo. Where, after a brief struggle as teacher of music, he had turned to playing for the movies. It must have nearly slain the man, for he was a sincere artist, a lover of classical music ... and now compelled to play ragtime and popular melodies for a living.

All that I held of him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance--his breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and talking directly into his nose....

* * * * *

But his successor was playing at an introductory musicale....

A tall, alert, dark young man ... Italian-dark ... his eyes shone behind his gold-rimmed glasses, swimming large and distorted under the magnification of the lenses ... his lips were full and red, his moustache of a heavy, bristly black that made them look redder and fuller still, almost negroid.

He played the piano with violent, expert energy ... his favourite work was the "Turkish Patrol," which, Spalton exclaimed, as he applauded vigorously, he would now adopt as the Eos anthem.

The drawing-room was crowded ... a few visiting celebrities ... Eoites, too, but only the quasi-celebrities among them. The mass of the workers was as rigidly excluded now, under the new regime, as ordinary retainers ever are.

I stood by my "Southern Lady." She was in evening dress ... wore a lorgnette ... I trembled as I leaned over her, for I could see the firm, white-orbed upper parts of her breasts ... I was trying to be lightly playful, and was clumsy at it. I took up her lorgnette and toyed with it. I sat on the edge of a table ... and where I sat stood a supposed Greek vase of great antiquity and value.

It is a law that prevails in three-dimensional space that two objects cannot occupy the same place at one time. I dislodged the vase. It came to the floor in a crash ... which stopped the music ... which stopped everything. There fell a dead silence. I looked down at the fragments, hardly knowing what to do....

Spalton came over to me ... intensely ... his eyes blazing.

"Razorre, come out into the lobby ... I want to speak to you." I willingly followed him ... he wheeled on me when he had me alone.

"Do you know why we have these paintings of Gresham's hung high up there on the wall?" he asked rhetorically, with an eloquent, upward sweep of his arm, "it's so bums like you ... dirty tramps ... can't wipe their feet on them."

"I am so sorry, so very sorry," I murmured, contrite.

Thinking my contrition meekness, and possibly fear of him, he went to take me by the shoulders. I knocked his hands away promptly and quickly stepped back, on the defensive ... all my reverence for him swallowed up in indignation, rising at last, against his vulgar chiding.

At that moment, my widow, Mrs. Tighe, arrived ... she was weeping....

"Don't be hard on the poor boy," she pleaded ... "anyhow, it was all my fault ... and I want to pay you for your vase ... whatever it cost."...

A momentary flicker of greed lighted the Master's eyes. But he perceived as instantly how unmagnanimous he would appear if he accepted a cash settlement.

"I am not thinking of my financial loss ... beauty cannot be valued that way!" he exclaimed.

"Then you must not blame the boy."

"He is clumsy ... he is a terrible fool ... he is always doing the wrong thing. Oh, my beautiful vase!" and he wrung his hands, lost in the pose. Out he strode through the front door.

* * * * *

The musicale had been broken up.

"My poor, dear Johnnie, I am so sorry," murmured the young woman. I was sitting in the large armchair where she had sat the memorable night of the lecture that neither of us attended. She had seated herself on one of the arms.

"You mustn't be despondent!" She was patting my hand.

She mistook my rage at the gratuitous insults Spalton had heaped on me as despondency. She leaned closer against me ... quickly I caught her into my arms, drew her into my lap ... held her little, quiet, amazed face in my hands firmly, as I kissed and kissed her.... I knew how to kiss now....

She rose presently. I stood up and caught her in my arms. Slowly and firmly she disengaged herself ... silently she slid away. She stopped in the shadow a moment before going up the long, winding stairs.

"Good night, my dear poet," she whispered.

She had no sooner disappeared than I started out, my heart beating like a drum to a charge in me. Spalton frequently wrote till late, in his office. I would go over there and, if he was there, call him to account for his insults. There was a light lit within, and I could see him through the window at his desk.

"Come in!" in answer to my knock. "Oh, it's you, Razorre!" and his eyes snapped with fresh resentment. "What do you want? Don't you know that I'm busy on _A Brief Visit_?"

"You know why I'm here!"

"Well?" challengingly.

"I've come for two reasons. I want to apologise to you for breaking that vase ... and I demand an equal apology from you, in turn, for the way you insulted me in Mrs. Tighe's presence."

"You deserved everything I said to you," he replied, rising quietly from his chair.

"I may have deserved it ... but that doesn't alter in the least my intention of smashing your face flat for the way you spoke to me, unless you tell me you're sorry for it."

"My dear Gregory, don't be a fool."

"A fool?" I replied, inflamed further by the appellation applied to quiet me in such a superior tone, "if you'll come on out into the street and away from your own property, I'll show you who's a fool ... you'll find you can't treat me like a dog, and get away with it!"

"Why, Razorre ... my dear, dear boy," calling me by my nickname and taking another tack ... he laid his hand gently on my shoulder and gave me a deep, burning look of compassionate rebuke ... though I saw fear flickering back of it all....

"Look here, John," I burst out, never able to hold my wrath long, "I like you ... think you're a great man--but you humiliated me before other people ... and I've come to such a pass in my life that I wouldn't let God Himself get away with a thing like that!"

"Then I apologise ... most humbly!"

"That was all I wanted. Good-night!" But I could not bring myself to leave so abruptly.

"John," I wavered, "you _are_ a great man ... a much greater man than you allow yourself to be ... I'm--I'm going away from here forever, this time ... and I--I want you to know how I reverence and love the bigness in you, in spite of our--our differences."

He was pleased.

"And so you're going to college somewhere?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

I had talked much of college being my next aim.

"Either the University of Chicago, or further west."

"I can give you commutation as far as Chicago."

"I cannot accept it."

"You must, Razorre."

* * * * *

A week from then I left.

I went up to Mrs. Tighe's room to say good-bye. Awkwardly and with the bearlike roughness of excessive timidity I put my arms about her, drew her to me tentatively.

"Be careful, poet dear, or you'll hurt me," she warned, giving me a look of fondness. Her left arm was in a sling. She had fallen on the steps a few days before and had broken a small bone in the wrist. "My sweet poet!"

The bandaged arm being in the way, I put my head down in her lap again, as she sat there on the edge of the great, white bed.

She leaned over, turned my face up with her free hand, kissed me full in the mouth....

"My sweet poet," she repeated, "good-bye!"

* * * * *

While at Mt. Hebron I had chosen German as my modern language. And it was a Professor Langworth's grammar and exercise book that we used as a text-book. Langworth, I learned from the title page, was professor of Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.

And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be less appallingly machine-like.

The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar's office) overwhelmed me with their number. And I fled. With the exception of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode a freight further to Laurel.

* * * * *

In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards at Laurel....

I enquired my way to the university.

"Up on the hill."

I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud, over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....

The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.

One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights. As I stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor Langworth's house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished tittering when they saw me. And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from my long ride.

I asked them the direction to Langworth's house, but they ignored me, and scattered. Turning in confusion, I ran into a man-student bodily ... excused myself ... the girls, standing further off, tittered again.

"Can you direct me to Professor Gustav Langworth's house?"

The student looked me over curiously. But he was of the right sort.

"Certainly. Come with me. I'm going that way. I'll show you where it is...."

* * * * *

In silence we descended the hill....

"That house, in there a bit, under the trees ... that is where the professor lives."

My knock set a dog barking inside ... the quick, insistent bark of a collie that romped against me, putting up its paws on me when the door was opened by a slim-bodied man of middle height. The man was dressed in a grey suit ... he had a kindly, smooth-shaven face except for a close-cropped pepper-and-salt moustache ... and grey-blue, quizzical, but kindly eyes.

"Here, Laddie, come here!" called the voice of a frail, little woman whose hair was white like wool, and like wool in texture. She sat crumpled up by an open gas fire of imitation logs. She Was wry-backed, her right shoulder thrust out into a discernible hunch.

She flung her arm tenderly about the dog, when it came to her. She was, I figured, the professor's mother.... He held a hurried, whispered consultation with her--after I had told him that studying his German book at Mt. Hebron had impelled me to come to Laurel. Which story I could see pleased and flattered him.

I was waiting in the storm porch.

He returned. He thrust his hand into his pocket and fetched forth a two-dollar bill.

"Go downtown to one of the restaurants you will find on the main street. You can get a square meal in one of them for a quarter or, at the most, fifty cents ... a bed for the same price ... climb the hill again in the morning, say about ten o'clock, and ask for me at the German Department ... I am sorry I can't invite you to stay here for the night ... but we have no room ..." and he glanced timidly at the woman whom I had taken to be his mother, but who, I afterward learned, was his wife.

* * * * *

I found a restaurant-hotel, as he had directed me, and procured my supper for a quarter ... fried potatoes and a cold slab of steak ... and a big Westerner who wore a sombrero and had a stupid, kindly, boyish face, showed me to a bed ... which also cost but a quarter for the night ... with a scattered ambuscade of bedbugs thrown in for good measure.

In the morning, fried pork chops, pancakes and two cups of coffee--and I set out for the hill.

The place buzzed with activity. The fall term was already in full swing, and students poured in lines up and down both sides of the steep street that led to the college ... girls and boys both, for it was co-educational. They were well dressed and jolly, as they moved in the keen windy sun of autumn.

I was not a part of this. I felt like an outcast, but I bore myself with assumed independence and indifference. I thought everybody was looking at me. Most of them were.

* * * * *

Langworth enrolled me as a special student. He himself paid my tuition fee, which was a nominal one. I enrolled in Philosophy, Economics, German, Latin.

My patron, furthermore, slipped a ten-dollar bill into my hand. "For the books you will need."

He directed me to the Y.M.C.A. employment bureau. "They will see that you get work at something, so you can be sure of board and room ... in the early days we did not have things so well arranged. I worked my way through college, too. I nearly perished, my first year. After you settle somewhere, come and see me once in a while and let me hear how you're getting on."

* * * * *

My first job was milking a cow and taking care of a horse, for board and room.... The man for whom I worked was an old, retired farmer.

The disagreeable part of taking care of horses and cows is the smell. My clothes, my room, even the skin of my body, soon reeked with the faint yet penetrating odour of stable and barn.

But I was happy. Many great men had done as I was doing. Always trust me to dramatise every situation!

I arranged my meagre row of text-books on the shelf in my attic. I set Keats apart in a sacred nook by himself.

I sat humming softly to myself, studying my first lessons.

* * * * *

"Look," cried a girl, her voice vibrating with the hard sarcasm of youth, "look, there goes Abe Lincoln," to another girl and two boys, who lolled with her on the porch of the house next mine.

I was stabbed with a bitter pang of resentment. For my face was thin and weather-beaten ... my sharp, bent knees never straightened as I walked along, like a man going through snow drifts. Yet I held my head erect, ridiculously erect ... and my chest was enormous through over-development, as my arms and legs were thin.

* * * * *

My first few days at Laurel University brought me that beginning of newspaper notoriety that has since followed me everywhere as a shadow goes with a moving object. And then originated the appellation which has since clung to me, that of "The Vagabond Poet."

One morning, when I was hardly awake, there came a knock at my door.

"Just a moment," I called, getting into my shirt and trousers, "who is it?"

"A reporter to interview you."

I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he represented the Kansas City _Star_. As he spoke his keen grey eyes looked me over impartially, but with intelligent, friendly interest. Though he was dressed in the student's conventional style, even to the curiously nicked and clipped soft hat then predominant, there was still about him an off-handedness, an impudent at-homeness that bespoke a wider knowledge, or assumed knowledge, of the world, than the average student possesses.

The interview appeared the next afternoon.

"VAGABOND POET ARRIVES.

LAUREL ENROLLS BOX-CAR STUDENT."

It made me a nine days' wonder with the students. I caught the men staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from class room to class room....

But the reek of the stable. It went with me like a ghost everywhere. Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ... I saw that it was noticeable to others, and I sat 'way back, in a seat apart, by myself.

* * * * *

Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.

One afternoon as I was passing his house he beckoned me in.

"You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on you as my protege ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in _Wilhelm Tell_, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too.... And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class for you to translate and construe."

Langworth had only half the truth from King.

Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it without hesitation.

* * * * *

About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of the New York _Independent_. He informed me that he had taken a poem of mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.

Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the _Independent_.

* * * * *

I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with me wherever I went.

Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.

* * * * *

The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.

They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ... and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the dam....

At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to teach.

Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of low-lying country. This place was known as the "Bottoms."

I am trying to give you the flavour of the town.

They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power ... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a concomitant prostitution of coloured women and girls throve. One or two students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they were fond....

The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus frumenti--for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble," which seemed to be prevalent and epidemic throughout the community.

* * * * *

Saturday was market day for the farmers who lived in the adjoining countryside ... and the livery stables where they put up their horses were also resorts for gambling and the selling of "bootleg" booze....

These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.

There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their trade ... "a square meal for a quarter" ... and a square meal they served ... multitudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee. Where these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little bootlegging on the side.

It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job. The same one where I had spent my first night in town.

* * * * *

Langworth sent for me one day.

"I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I considered I ought to see you about it."

I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored professors and students.

My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to me the proverb of "birds of a feather."

* * * * *

Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been barren of fruit.

"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs, querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.

"Laddie has just died."

"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.

"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was." There was an acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she wanted her husband to send me away.

"She wants you to go," whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a sick child. He escorted me into the storm porch. "You have no idea," he apologised defensively, "how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you can become...."

"What's this?" I asked, taken aback. He had thrust a check into my hand as he shook hands good-bye.

"It's a check I've just endorsed over to you. Royalties on a recent text-book. Please do take it." I had intimated that I would probably be compelled to quit college and go on the tramp again ... confessing frankly, also, that a stationary life got on my nerves at times.

"I want you to keep on, not go back to the tramp life ... we'll make something of you yet," he jested, diffidently, steering me off when he noticed that I was about to heap profuse thanks on him.

"How can I ever thank you--"

"By studying hard and making good. By becoming the great poet I wanted to be."

"But how can I pay this back? It will take a long time--"

"When you arrive at the place where you can afford to pay me back, pass it on to someone else who is struggling as you are now, and as I myself have struggled."

* * * * *

Always, always I wrote my poetry and kept studying in my own fashion ... marks of proficiency, attendance at class went by the board. My studying was rather browsing among the multitudes of books in the college library. I passed hours, back in the stacks, forgetting day and night ... recitations ... meals....

I was soon in trouble with my professors ... I was always up, and even ahead, with my studies, but I was a disrupting influence for the other students, because of my irregularity.

I discovered wonderful books back there in the "stack" ... the works of Paracelsus, who whispered me that wisdom was to be found more in the vagabond bye-ways of life than in the ordered and regulated highways. That the true knowledge was to be garnered from knocking about with vagrants, gipsies, carriers ... from corners in wayside inns where travellers discoursed....

And there was Boehmen, the inspired German shoemaker, who was visited by an angel, or some sort of divine stranger, and given his first illumination outside his shop ... and later walked a-field and heard what the flowers were saying to each other, seeing through all creation at one glance, crystal-clear.

And there were the unusual poets ... old Matthew Prior, who wrote besides his poems, the Treaty, was it, of Utrecht?... hobnobbed with the big people of the land ... yet refused all marks of honour ... the best Latinist of the day ... at a time when Latin was the diplomatic language of Europe.

When he wasn't hobnobbing with the aristocracy or writing treaties he was sitting in inns and drinking with teamsters ... had a long love affair with a cobbler's wife, and married the lady after the cobbler died....

There was Skelton and his rough-running, irregular rhythmic rather than strictly metrical verses ... mad and ribald ... often tedious ... but with wild flashes of beauty interwoven through his poems ... the poem about his mistress's sparrow ... the elegy on its death ... where he prayed God to give it the little wren of the Virgin Mary, as a wife, in heaven--"to tread, for _solas_!"

And Gay, the author of many delightful fables ... who must wait still longer for his proper niche, because he showed gross levity on the subject of death and life ... he who wrote for his own epitaph:

"Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it."

For all those who would not keep step, who romped out of the regular procedure and wantoned by the way, picking what flowers they chose, I held feeling and sympathy.

* * * * *

The _Annual_, a book published by the seniors each spring, now advertised a prize for the best poem submitted by any student ... a prize of twenty-five dollars. I had no doubt but that the prize was mine already. Not that I had become as yet the poet I desired, but that the average level of human endeavour in any art is so low that I knew my assiduity and application and fair amount of inspiration would win.

I wrote my poem--_A Day in a Japanese Garden_, ... only two lines I remember:

"And black cranes trailed their long legs as they flew
Down to it, somewhere out of Heaven's blue,"

descriptive of a little lake ... oh, yes, and two more I remember, descriptive of sunset:

"And Fujiyama's far and sacred top
Became a jewel shining in the sun."

The poem was an over-laquered, metaphor-cloyed thing ... much like the bulk of our free verse of to-day ... but it was superior to all the rest of the contributions.

The prize was declared off. After an evening's serious discussion the committee decided that, though my effort was far and away the best, it would not do to let me have the prize, because I was so wild-appearing ... because I was known as having been a tramp. And because seniors and students of correct standing at the university had tried. And it would not be good for the school morale to let me have what I had won.

They compromised by declaring the prize off.

A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award.

I thought of the couplet of Gay:

"He who would without malice pass his days
Must live obscure and never merit praise."

* * * * *

Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.

When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....

Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education, not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to dead and commonplace formulae.

On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and creased ... which,--now dead,--it was pretended their spirits took up and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....

* * * * *

And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the fly in the ointment....

I thought of my Southern widow, Mrs. Tighe.

"Poet," she had once said, "come to my place in the South. I have a bungalow back of my house that you may live in ... write your poems unmolested ... I won't be going there for awhile yet, but I will give you a letter to the caretaker, and you can use the place. And my pantry and ice box will be at your service ... so you'll need do nothing but write."

Now, fed full of rebuffs, I wished I had accepted her offer. And I wrote her, care of the Eos Artworks ... an ingenuous letter, burning with naive love....

She had once told me how she had scandalised the neighbours by painting a little boy, in the nude, in that same bungalow ... the story being carried about by the servants ... and if it had not been for her social prestige!--

I thought there could be nothing pleasanter than living in her place, perhaps becoming her lover....

I imagined myself posing, nude, for her canvases....

But my brief hope fell to earth. A curt note from a married sister of hers ... who first apologised for having read my letter.... But Mrs. Tighe was abroad, painting in Spain.

The shock of having someone else, indubitably with a hostile eye, read my letter, in which I had poured forth all my heart, made me almost sick. I was chagrined inexpressibly.

* * * * *

The truth was, spring was coming on. Spring affects me as it does migratory fowls. With its first effort of meadow and bough toward renewed flowers and greenness, the instinct for change and adventure stirs anew in me.

The school year was not yet up, but I didn't want to graduate.

* * * * *

At that time I had a passion for meeting well-known people.

It was then my only avenue of literary publication, so to speak. The magazines were steadily returning my deluge of poems--I sent at least three a week to them ... but to those who had established themselves I could show my work, and get their advice and notice....

* * * * *

Walking along the main street, I ran into Jack Travers, the young reporter who had dubbed me the "Vagabond Poet," the "Box-car Bard."...

"Well, what are you up to now, Gregory?"

"Nothing, only I'm thinking of a trip south to Osageville to pay a visit to Mackworth, the Kansas novelist."

"That's the stuff ... I need another good story for the _Era_."

"I'm going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot."

"Great! 'Vagabond Poet' Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan. It's only ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ... but you'll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can get the story in in time for this Sunday's _Era_...."

Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.

"Come on, we'll walk up an alley and I'll snap you just as if you were on the way...."

"No, I won't do that!"

--"won't do what?"

--"won't fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will have to be on the way!"

"Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo you'll have to plough through?" he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud, grumbling, to the edge of town.

There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in my hand.

Travers waved me good-bye. "You'll see the story in the _Era_ Sunday sure," he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.

* * * * *

It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.

My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the impractical,--the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks and small business men bred in my people for generations!...