Chapter XI: Part 11

I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and sliding. Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets. But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to my knees. And the "squash-squish!" of my soaked feet in the mud plodded a steady refrain of misery.

My Keats, at least, was dry. I kept the volume under my belt and against my naked belly.

And I was happy and buoyed up by the thought, which lessened my discomfiture, that Sunday morning thousands of readers in comfortable homes would be reading about me, would gaze upon my photograph.

People looked out of their farmhouse windows at me as if an insane man were stalking by.

It darkened rapidly.

My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more a usual thing to beg or ask for shelter.

I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly escaping from the edge of spilled molasses.

I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most.

The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped and dripped.

And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit.

Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that _I_ was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas....

And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we were on the _Maria Crowther_ ... we were still off the coast of England, and I had gone ashore for the last touching of my foot on English soil....

There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth....

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,..."

The evening star made me dream of immortality and love--my love for Fanny Brawne....

Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ... voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of Bacchus in _Endymion_ ... that was a big poem, after all....

Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....

"Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me."

"Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--"

"Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed at that--for a time!)

* * * * *

I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall, like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.

The mass of resistance I had to face, for poetry's sake, was too enormous ... my country's motto was not "beauty is truth, truth beauty," but "blessed be that man who can make two hills of corn grow where one bank of violets grew before," ... and my pilgrimage, in that hour of vision, it disgusted me ... for I was making it not to some grand poet like L'Estrange, but to the home of the chief exponent of the "Honest-to-God, No-Nonsense-About-Me Hick School of Literature" ... and associated with him was the syndicate poet, William Struthers, called familiarly Uncle Bill, whose daily jingles run together as prose, were now making him a fortune.

With the coming of dawn the day cleared, the sun glistened on a thousand puddles, making them silver and gold....

By walking carefully on the side of the road, I made progress less muddy. I was used to the squashing of the water in my shoes. The weather turned warmer.

* * * * *

I found myself on the usual long one-street called Main Street, in the prosperous little city of Osageville. It was Sunday. A corner loiterer directed me to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth's house.

A habitation of sequestered quiet ... as I stood before the door I heard the sunrise song of Rossini's _Wilhelm Tell_ ... a Red Seal record ... accompanied by the slow, dreamy following of a piano's tinkle ... like harp sounds or remote, flowing water.

I halted, under a charm. I waited till the melody was at an end before I knocked. A small, pale-faced, pretty little woman answered.

"Does Mr. Jarvis Mackworth live here?"

"Yes. Come in. We have been expecting you. You are the poet, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am the poet."

"You're a good walker ... we didn't expect you before Monday or Tuesday.... Jarvis, here's the poet-boy from the university."

My host, unseen within, turned off another Red Seal record he had just started, again to the accompaniment of the piano.... Kreisler's _Caprice Viennoise_....

Jarvis Alexander Mackworth came forth like a leisurely duck, waddling. He was very, very fat. He extended me a plump, white hand ... a slack hand-shake ... but not an unhearty one, rather a grip of easy welcome.

A kind, rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Shelley's father, plump and methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, shining ecstasy of Shelley's countenance itself--you would have had Mackworth's face before its time. I never beheld such spirituality in a fat man. His stoutness was not unpleasing.

"My boy ... come in ... my God, you're all wet ... you look frail, too." A pity shone in his eyes. "Minnie, call up Ally Merton ..." turning to me, "I have, as you can see, no clothes to fit you ... but Ally might have ... he's about your size, but he carries a trifle more meat on his bones....

"Come in and dry yourself before the fire till he gets over."

We sat before the gas-fire of artificial logs.

"Minnie, will you make a cup of tea for this--poor boy," and he lowered his voice at the last two words, realising that I was hearing, too.

"Yes, Jarv!"

* * * * *

I sat at the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in accompaniment with the records ... it was Caruso now....

"A glorious voice, isn't it, young man?" Mackworth asked, as I ate voraciously of the cold roast set before me ... of the delicious white bread and fresh dairy butter, just from the churn of some neighbouring farmer.

"I know nothing much about music," he continued, "--just appreciate it ... --seems to me that's what we need now, more than anything else ... appreciation of the arts.... I like to sit here and pick out the melodies on the piano as the tune runs on. It inspires me. The precious people, the aesthetic upstarts, make fun of Edison and his 'canned music,' as they call it ... but I say Edison is one of the great forces for culture in America to-day. Everybody can't go to New York, London, Paris, Bayreuth ... not to Chicago even....

"Beauty must come to Osageville, since Osageville cannot come to Beauty."

I was charmed.

"Mr. Mackworth, you are a great man," I said.

* * * * *

A ring at the bell. Ally Merton....

"Ally, this is Mr. John Gregory, poet at large, Villon of American Literature ... let us hope, some day a little more of the Whittier ... Ally--" and the speaker turned to me, "Ally Merton is my right hand man ... my best reporter...."

He took Merton aside, in private talk.... Ally looked me over with a keen, swift glance that appraised me from head to foot instantly ... sharply but not hostilely ... as one who takes in a situation in a comprehensive instant.

"Yes, Mr. Mackworth, I can do it easily ... if they'll fit him."

There was an impersonality, however, about Merton's cryptic words that annoyed me.

"You are going home with Ally, John," Mackworth said to me, using my familiar name for the first time, "and borrow a suit of his clothes ... and you are coming back with him to dinner ... where you'll meet a very famous person--Miss Clara Martin."

* * * * *

Ally's blue serge suit was too short in the legs and arms for me ... otherwise it fitted. His gentleness and unobtrusive quietness entered into me, along with the putting on of his apparel. He led me upstairs in his house.

"Mr. Mackworth has asked me to put you up while you are in town ... because his own house is full at present, otherwise he would accommodate you there ... I guess we can make shift to entertain you properly.

"Here is the bathroom ... if you don't mind my saying it, when you throw the toilet seat up, let the water run from the tap over the wash basin ... my mother and sisters!" he trailed off in inaudible, deprecative urge of the proprieties.

Ally was anything but a small-town product. Suave, socially adroit, an instinctive creature of Good Form....

He came into the room he had given me to stay in. I looked like a different man, togged out in his clothes. Ally was surprised that I could wear his shoes ... he had such small feet ... I informed him proudly that I, too, had small feet....

"No, no, that is not the way to tie a tie ... let me show you ... you must make both ends meet exactly ... there, that's it!" and he stepped back, a look of satisfaction on his face ... he handed me a pearl stick pin.

"This is a loan, not a gift," he murmured.

I returned a quick, angry look.

"I don't want your pin."

"No offence meant," he deprecated, "and you must wear it" (for I was putting it aside) "Mr. Mackworth and I both want you to look your best when you meet Miss Martin at dinner to-night".... I angrily almost decided to take his pin with me when I left, just to fulfill his pre-supposition.

"No, that's not the place to stick it ... let me show you ... not in the body of the tie, but further down," and he deftly placed the pin in the right spot. Then he stepped back like an artist who is proud of having made a good job of bad materials....

"You look almost like a gentleman."

I was about to lick into Merton and lend him a sample of a few strong objurgations of road and jail, when I saw myself in the glass. I stood transfixed. He had not meant to be ironic. The transformation was startling....

"If you would only keep yourself tidy all the time that way!... it's easy."

"Not for me ... everything material that I touch seems to fall apart.... I lose my shirts inexplicably ... my socks ... holes appear overnight in my clothes. Books are the only things I can keep. I am always cluttered up with them."

"Appearances mean everything ... then, if you have the rest, the goods to deliver, there is no place a man might not go nor attain."

I looked the small town reporter over in surprise. I studied him closely for the first time. He belonged to the world, not to Osageville ... the world of fashion, of smartness ... a world I despised. My world and his would always be like separate planets. He would consort with people for the mere pleasure of social life with them. The one thing I did not like about him was his small mouth ... but then I did not like my own mouth ... it was large, sensual, loose and cruel.

And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing. But then my walk was a loose, bent-kneed method of progression....

* * * * *

Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains of industry, was dark and tall. She had been good-looking in girlhood. She had fine eyes in a devastated face.

I found myself petted, mothered by her. As soon as she saw me she removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.

At supper I was told of a new project. A group of writers, especially of writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be called the _National Magazine_; for it was to be no less than that, a magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more impossible ideals of small business units--the ideal of a bourgeois commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.

I was assured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing American ideals and dreams was needed by them.... Ray Stannard Baker, Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....

I saw clearly that their revolution was a backward-working one. That the country's business could never again be broken up into a multitude of small shops and individual competitors.

Of course, I was at that time a Socialist of the violent, fiery type--with a strong cast toward the anarchism of Emma Goldman.

But it flattered me to be taken, as it were, into the inner councils of such great folk....

"Send us some of your poetry, with the right American ring to it, Johnnie," suggested Miss Martin, "and we will make you the poet of the group."

I think that Ally Merton's clothes on me, and his correct tie, made my good impression, as much as my after-talk around the fireplace, where I spun yarns of my strange life and adventures.

* * * * *

"You made a hit," commented Ally, as he conducted me back to his house, "it's a great opening for you. Follow it up!"

"I will!"

* * * * *

That night I could not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body. Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses, each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of simplicity in it, and the dignity of honest labour.

Yes, I would be their poet. And America's poet....

And visions of a comfortable, bourgeois success took me ... interminable Chautauquas, with rows of women listening to my inspiring verses ... visits as honoured guest to the homes of great popular leaders like Roosevelt ... dignity and rides in parlour cars, instead of dusty, dirty box cars ... interviews of weight and speeches of consequence ... and the newspapers would drop their undercurrent of levity when I was written about in them, and treat me with consideration.

Finally, I would possess a home like Mackworth's, set back amid shade trees, a house not too large, not too small ... a cook and maid ... a pretty, unobtrusive wife devoted to me....

And I would wear white linen collars every day, tie the ends of my tie even ... and each year would see a new book of mine out, published by some bookseller of repute ... and I could afford Red Seal records ... and have my largest room for a library....

Middle-class comfort was upon me ... good plumbing ... electric light ... laundry sent out ... no more washing of my one shirt overnight and hanging it up to dry on the back of a chair, while I slept ... and putting it on, next morning, crinkly and still damp.

I was already seduced, if there hadn't been that something in me which I myself could not control!

* * * * *

It was when I caught Mackworth on the streets of his town and in his newspaper office that I discovered the man himself.

In our country, especially in the Middle West, everybody watches everybody else for the least lapse in the democratic spirit.

Though he was truly democratic at heart, Mackworth laid it on in theatric outward appearance, in true line with the Kansas tradition of a sockless Jerry Simpson, who went without socks, as the adjective implies, and made Congress on that one platform of his sartorial lack ... of William Roscoe Stubbs, who rode into the office of governor partly on the fact that his daughter could make salt-rising bread ... a form of bread-making cultivated by the hardy pioneers of the state, and now no longer necessary.

Mackworth was "in-legged" ... that is, his legs on the insides rubbed together from the crotch to the knees ... and he wore old patches, hanging there actually in strips ... and, I think, had his trouser-seat patched, too ... and though he could have afforded a car, he drove about, he and his family, in a rickety old two-seated rig, deliberately kept, it seemed, in ill-repair ... and it was such an old ex-plow horse that dragged it about!

His fellow townsmen laughed, but they liked it. "Jarv's all right! No nonsense about Jarv, even ef he is one o' them lit'rary fellers!"

To call everybody by the first name--that was the last word in honest, democratic fellowship.

* * * * *

Whether this exterior appearance of Mackworth was sincere or affected in him I never could quite tell. I am almost inclined to believe it was not done for effect,--but out of an Assisian simplicity of heart, as a sign manual of Bourgeois integrity.

If it was an affectation, his personal attitude toward the people with whom he came into contact was not ... in his office everybody loved him, and worked for him with that easy efficiency that comes of good will and respect....

Unostentatiously and affectionately he went about helping people.

"We've got a wonderful town here ... very little vice, except that which always will be in every community because it is inherent in human nature ... we have a fine college of our own ... a fine electric plant ... everybody's lawn is well-kept ... nobody in this town need be out of a job ... for miles around us the land is rich in real wealth of waving corn and wheat....

Kansas will be the centre, the Athens, of our civilisation, one day....

We have a fine Harvey Eating House at our railway station, managed by a hustler ... you must have Ally take you there for dinner before you go back to Laurel."

The idealisation of small comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster of violets grew before."

No wonder that the _National Magazine_, starting with a splendid flourish of knight-errantry, degenerated into the mere, "let-well-enough-alone" thrift-crier it is.... "'How I Became an Expert Tombstone Salesman' ... 'How I collected Tin Foil After Work-Hours and Added Three Hundred a Year Extra to My Salary as Stenographer.'..."

Rather, far rather, the Rockefeller, that shrewd manipulator of businesses ... with all his parsimony in personal economics ... his diet of bread and milk ... and his giving away of millions to missions and scientific institutions....

Rather the big Morgan, who knew the old masters as well as he knew the weaknesses of men ... who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his grim, forbidding dignity.

This at least presented bigness and romance!

* * * * *

"Want to meet Uncle Bill?" and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room blue-thick with smoke....

I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our entry.

There sat--the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he assumed visible, hazy outline--William Struthers, known to the newspaper world as "Old Uncle Bill," the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of the ordinary.

Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire. His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped and drew up a chair for me.

"Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry," he began deprecatingly, "but I do a lot of good for folks ... folks read my stuff when they ain't got time to read the real poets."

Instead of flattering him, I gave him, frankly but gently, my opinion of the cornfed school of literature, easing the sting by inferring that he without doubt had bigger things up his sleeve than his so-called prose poems.

What I said struck the right chord.

"Of course a fellow has to make a living first."

(But, in my heart, I thought--it is just as vile for a man to send his wife out as a street-walker, and allege the excuse about having to live, as it is for a poet to prostitute his Muse.)

* * * * *

Nevertheless, Mackworth, Uncle Bill and I stood together, in the sunny street outside, posing for the photographer. And I swelled with inordinate pride. Though I knew I was bigger than both of them put together, yet, in the eyes of the world, these men were big men--and having my photograph taken with them was an indication to me, that I was beginning to come into my own.

Perhaps our picture would be reproduced in some Eastern paper or magazine ... perhaps even in the _Bookman_.

* * * * *

"Uncle Bill Struthers is an example of what Kansas can do for a man...." said Mackworth, when we were alone. "Bill, in the old days, was a sort of tramp printer ... clever, but with all his ability in him unexpressed ... he was always down and out ... and drink! It verged on dipsomania. He never held a job long ... though he was a good compositor, he was always on the move from place to place....

"Then he came to Kansas where we have prohibition ... and it has panned out in Uncle Bill's case pretty fine.

"He came to work for me ... fell by chance into his prose-poetry vein. It took; was instantly copied in all the newspapers ... of course, I could do it as well, or anyone else with a rhyming turn ... but he was the originator ... and people liked his sturdy common sense, his wholesome optimism.

"Now Bill is happy; his stuff's syndicated--in thousands of households wherever English is spoken his name is a familiar word. He gives whole communities strength to go on with the common duties of life."

"And his drinking?"

"He has conquered that entirely ... once every so often the fit comes over him--the craving for it--then, when Uncle Bill turns up missing, as the Irishman puts it, none of us worries....

"We all know he has hitched up his horse and buggy and is off, driving and driving and driving across country, to work the fit out ... no, he never touches anything stronger than tobacco and coffee now....

"In a few days he comes back ... no one says a word ... we all know ... and love and respect him....

"He's happy now, is Uncle Bill ... married a young wife ... has a home all his own ... money piling up in the bank."

* * * * *

Ally Merton smiled quizzically when I spoke of Uncle Bill to him....

"Yes, Uncle Bill's a fine, quaint old chap ... whenever he has a tiff with his wife--of course, never anything serious--he locks himself in the kitchen ... closes all the windows ... smokes up terrifically with his corncob ... and plays and plays for hours on end ... his Red Seal records of classical music of which he is so fond.

"This behaviour of his is a well-known joke among us, a joke with his wife, to!" ... the speaker paused, to continue--

"He has a good library and quite a large knowledge of the English poets."

"That makes it all the more terrible," I replied, "for if he wrote his verse-prose out of ignorance, he might be somewhat forgiven ... but he knows better."

* * * * *

I gave a lecture on Keats to a woman's club. They paid me thirty dollars for the lecture....

"Well, you surely made a killing ... those old birds will worship you for life," sniggered Ally.

* * * * *

Mackworth and I had a farewell talk before I returned to Laurel. We stood again in front of his office, on the sunny street ... he had come out to bid me good-bye.

We talked of the folk poetry of America.... Mackworth recited to me several of the songs and ballads which I have since seen in Lomax's book of Cowboy Songs.... I repeated the tale of how I had collected the jail-songs that I subsequently lost while jumping a freight....

"There's lots of poetry in American life ... Stephen Foster Collins scratched the surface of it ... but he was a song writer....

"There's poetry on farm, ranch, in small town, big city, all waiting for the transmuting touch of the true singer ... not newspaper rhymes ... neither the stock effusions on Night, Love, Death and Immortality inserted as tail-piece to stories and articles in magazines....

"There's the negro mind ...--ought to hear them sing, making up songs as they load and unload boats along the Mississippi ... nobody's ever dug back into the black mind yet--why don't you do these things?"...

* * * * *

"Good-bye, Mister Mackworth--I've had a fine time!"

"Good-bye, my boy ... be a good boy ... God bless you!"

* * * * *

At the Harvey Eating House the manager brought me out a cardboard box neatly packed, full of all manner of good things to eat....

"Good-bye, Ally! thanks for your hospitality, Ally! thank your folks for me again!"

"I will. See you up at Laurel some day soon!"

For Merton was coming to study there, in the fall.

* * * * *

Back in Laurel I resumed my studies again in my intense though haphazard way. Doctors' degrees and graduation certificates did not interest me. I meditated no career in which such credentials would stand me in stead. But the meat and substance of what the world had achieved, written, thought--it was this that I sought to learn and know.

Already the professors were beginning to row about me and report me for cutting recitations. On the score of my scholarship and my knowing my subject they had no complaint. It was that I disrupted their classes and made for lax discipline.

But I seldom cut class deliberately.... I would find myself lost in a book back in the "stack" as the big room that housed the tiers of books was called. The day would be dusking, the lights of evening glimmering below in town, to my bewildered eyes! The day gone, when I had stepped back among the books at nine o'clock, intending to while away a half hour between classes! (Once it was Sidney's Arcadia that entranced me so).

Or I would set out for class ... hatless ... my hair tousled and long ... in my sandals that were mocked at by my colleagues ... my books under arm ... and fall into a reverie that would fetch me up, two miles or so away, a-stray up a by-road flanked with a farmhouse and young cornfields.

Then it would be too late for my schoolday, and I would make a day of it ... would perhaps get acquainted with some farmer and his family, have dinner and supper at his house, and swap yarns with him and the rest of his people.

* * * * *

Jack Travers was as proud of my foot-trip to Osageville as if he had accomplished it himself.

"The boys out at the Sig-Kappa house expect three or four kegs of beer in from Kansas City ... come on out and help us to celebrate."

"But I don't drink."

"Go on! you've told me about the time you did what you called 'slopping up' down in Texas!"

"That was only once ... and since then I've become a physical culturist."

"Well, come and join the party anyhow ... it won't hurt you to look on."

My curiosity impelled me to accept the invitation to the "keg party" as such a jamboree was known among the students.

The kegs of beer waited us at the station ... disguised with misleading labels ... "chemicals, handle with care." Tenderly we loaded them on the waggon that had been hired. The driver sat smiling as the solicitious students heaved them up and secured them firmly....

We sat dignified and quiet, till the outskirts of the town were reached ... then the whip was brought down and away we whooped, bouncing along the country road....

We whipped off down the road into the open country with a roar of singing and shouting. We sat on the kegs to keep them from jumping out, as we urged the driver to ply the whip.

* * * * *

There was a corner in a cornfield that bent inward, hidden from the casual passer-by by a grove of Osage orange trees. Here we drew up, jumped out, tenderly conveyed the kegs forth ... the ground we had chosen, in the corner of the field, was too rocky for planting. It was sultry early afternoon, of a late spring day.

The driver was offered a drink.

"Nope," he shook his head, grinning wisely, "I'm a teetotaler."

"Be back for us at dark," we shouted, as he jee-d about, heading toward town again.

"Here's to old Gregory and his first drunk!"

Tin cups had been produced, and the bung of one of the barrels started ... the boys lifted their full, foaming cups in unison.

"Bottoms up!"

I joined in the drinking, despite my previous protestation that I would not....

"Where's the old boy that runs this farm?"

"All the family's probably in town, this being Saturday afternoon."

"Let's whoop 'er up, then!"

We sang and shouted at the top of our voices.

The cups had been four times filled.

Though I had poured half of mine on the ground, I already felt dizzy. But also a pleasant tingling, a warmth, was slowly increasing in my nerves and veins and body ... an increased sense of well-being permeated me. I stopped spilling my beer on the ground and drank it eagerly.

Someone proposed races up and down the cornfield. We rolled up our trousers, to make it more hilarious, and ran, smashing through the tender spring growth ... yelling and shouting....

Then the game unaccountably shifted into seeing who could pull up the most corn stalks, beginning at an equal marked-off space out in each row and rushing back with torn-up handfuls....

The afternoon dropped toward twilight and everybody was as mellow as the departing day--which went down in a riot of gold....

A great area of the field looked as if it had fallen in the track of a victorious army, or had been fallen upon by a cloud of locusts.

A chill came in with twilight, and we built a fire, and danced about it.

I danced and danced ... we all danced and howled in Indian disharmony ... wailing ... screeching ... falling ... getting up again ... when I danced and leaped the world resumed its order ... when I stood still or sat down plump, the trees took up the gyrations where I had left off, and went about in solemn, ringing circles ... green and graceful minuets of nature....

"Here's to good old Gregory, drink 'er down, drink 'er down!" I heard the boys, led by Jack Travers, bray discordantly.

"Want 'a hear some songs?" I quavered, interrogating.

"What kind o' songs?" asked a big, hulking boy that we called 'Black Jim,' because of his dark complexion.

"Real songs," I replied, "jail songs, tramp songs, coacaine songs!"

All those Rabelaisan folk-things I had lost while hopping the freight, came surging back, each not in fragments, but entire. Drunk, I did then what my brain since, intoxicated or sober, cannot do ... I rendered them all, one after the other, just as I had copied them down....

* * * * *

"And more! Gregory, more!" the boys kept shouting.

I sat down and began to cry because I had lost the script. It had all gone out of my head again as quickly as it had come, so that I could not even repeat one they'd asked for.

"Hell, he's got a crying drunk the first thing!"

"Cheer up, old scout ... here's another cupful."

"No ... I don't want any more ... I'm never going to drink again."

And I knocked the cup out of Travers' hand with a violent drunken sweep of negation.

"No use getting huffy about it," someone put in belligerently.

"If anybody wants to fight," it was Black Jim, huge and menacing and morose, advancing....

Fight! knives! jails!...

Ah, yes, I was still in jail ... and Bud and the burly cotton thief were at it....

I staggered to my feet.

"Wait a minute, Bud ... I'm coming." I gave a run toward a barrel, sent it a violent kick, a succession of kicks....

"Wait a minute! I'm coming!"

"So am I!" grinned Black Jim belligerently, thinking I meant him and advancing slowly and surely.

The barrel burst asunder, the beer sumped and gurgled about my ankles as I stooped and picked up a stave.

"The damn fool's ruined a whole keg."

I was going to lick everybody in the jail, if I must.

"Put that stave down Gregory! put it down, for Christ's sake!"

"Good God! Grab Jim, someone!"

"Don't be a fool ... hold Gregory ... he's got the stave!"

"He'll kill Jim!"

"Or Jim'll kill him!"...

Then came a shout from nearby.

"I'll heve the law on ye, I will! destroyin' a man's cornfield like a lot o' heathens!"

Yelling and menacing, the farmer and his big, raw-boned son were upon us. They evidently thought that we were all in such a drunken condition that they could kick us about as they choose. They had just driven home from market-day in Laurel.

Everything was mixed up in my head ... but one thing out-stood: I must do my duty by my barrel stave ... as the farmer leaped into the circle he did not notice me staggering on the outskirts. I rushed up and let him have the barrel stave full across the head.

At the same time Black Jim had turned his attention to the rangy boy, felling him at a blow. The boy leaped to his feet and ran away to a safe distance.

"Paw!" he called out, 'I'll run back to th' house an' 'phone th' p'lice."

"Come on, boys, we'd better dig out!"

* * * * *

We straggled along in silent, rolling clusters, like bees smoked out, down the road ... we heard the rumble of a waggon ... when we recognised that it was our teetotaler coming back for us....

"God, if my old man hears of this I'm done for at Laurel."

"So'm I!"

"If we only lay low and don't go spouting off about it, things will be all O.K."

"We'll send Travers back with a little collection, to fix it up with the farmer, and blarney him out of taking any action."

* * * * *

In the morning I had a roaring headache ... as long as I lay quiet there was only the slow, deep regular pulse of pain driving through my head, but when I made an effort to get up, my eyeballs throbbed with such torment that they seemed to be starting out of my head....

I fell asleep in the broad day again, waking to find Jack Travers standing by my bed, pale and cynical, dusting off the ashes from the end of his eternal cigarette.

"How are you feeling this morning?"

"Rotten," I answered. I sat up and triphammers of pain renewed their pounding inside my racked head.

--"thought you would, so's soon as I got up, I came down to see you."

--"lot of good that'll do."

He whipped a flask out of his hip pocket. "Take a nip of this and it will set you right in a jiffy."

"No, I'll never drink another drop."

"Don't be a fool. Just a swallow and you'll be on your feet again."

I took a big swallow and it braced me up instantly.

"Now, come on with me, Johnnie, I'm taking you in tow for to-day! A fellow who's not used to getting drunk always mopes around after a good time like we had.... I'm seeing you through _the day after_ ... you're going to lunch with me at the frat-house and this afternoon there's a sacred concert on in Aeolian Hall that I have two tickets for."

"I'll never drink another drop as long as I live."

"That's what they all say."

* * * * *

At the Sig Kappas I met Black Jim, the first one, at the door. He shook hands shyly, laughingly.

"You sure fetched that rube a wallop ... he let one croak out of him and flopped flat ... it would have made a good comic picture."

"Lunch is ready, boys!"

I was made into a sort of hero--"a real, honest-to-God guy."

"You'll have to come to some of our frat jamborees ... Jack'll bring you up."

"We and the Sigma Deltas are Southern fraternities ... we have a hell of a sight more fun than the others ... there's the Sigma Pis--though they have some live birds, they're mostly dead ... and the Phi Nus put on too much side ... the Beta Omicrons are right there with the goods, though."

"I see."

A little freshman made an off-colour remark.

"You'd better go and see Jennie!" advised a genial young senior, who, for all his youth, was entirely bald.

"Jennie, who's Jennie?" I asked, curious.

"Our frat woman!" answered Travers casually.

"Frat woman?" I was groping for further information, puzzled.

"Yes, often a fraternity keeps a woman for the use of its members ... when a kid comes to us so innocent he's annoying, we turn him over to Jennie to be made a man of."

"This innocence-stuff is over-rated. It's better to send a kid to a nice, clean girl that we club in together and keep, and let him learn what life is, once and for all, than to have him going off somewhere and getting something, or, even worse, horning around and jeopardizing decent girls, as he's bound to otherwise."

* * * * *

There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could obtain credit.

But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the wheat harvest.

* * * * *

The editors of the _National Magazine_ had given a new impulsion to my song--and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed several of my effusions.

I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around me.....

In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a moral.

For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering frenzy of belief in what I was doing.

* * * * *

The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.

There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard he was in need of hands for the season.

I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's.

Bonton looked me over.

"You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard."

"I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't mind walking back to town."

Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of Osage orange trees.

Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang. We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small, oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ... much like the lunch waggons seen standing about the streets in cities.

"Hello, boys, is it dry enough to begin loadin' yet?"

"Naw; the dew's still as heavy as rain on the bundles."

"We'd best wait a little longer, then."

* * * * *

Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it, tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high.

I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite.

"I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically, peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again....

"I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls."

"Just give me time till I learn the hang of it."

I was better with the next load. The waggons came and went one after the other ... there was a light space of rest between waggons. It was like the rest between the rounds of a prizefight.

From the cloudless sky the sun's heat poured down in floods. A monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ... and in the long hedge of Osage oranges moaned wood doves....

By noon I had achieved a mechanical swing that helped relieve the physical strain, a swinging rhythm of the hips and back muscles which took the burden off my aching and weaker arms.

That afternoon, late, when the old man drove his waggon up to me for the hundredth time it seemed, he smiled quizzically.

"Well, here you are still, but you're too skinny to stand it another day ... better draw your two bucks from the boss and strike out for Laurel again."

--"that so, Daddy!" and I caught three bundles at once on the tines of my fork and flung them clear to the top, and over. They caught the old man in the midriff.... I heard a sliding about and swearing ... the next moment he was in a heap, on the ground ... on the other side of the waggon.

"What th' hell did ye do that for?"

I looked innocent. "Do what?"

--"soak me in the guts with three bundles to onct an' knock me off'n the top of the load?"

"Ever since morning you've been kidding me and telling me I went too slow for you.... I thought I'd speed up a bit."

After surveying me scornfully for a minute, he mutely reascended the load, and we finished the job in silence together....

We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.

* * * * *

Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.

I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough for the use of my blanket.

I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me and was breaking them into my breast....

The cramps....

I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through, till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my body....

The dutiful house dogs ... barking furiously, the two of them rushed at my apparition as I stood up in the trough and splashed. They embayed me as a quarry. I jumped out of the trough and threw stones at them. They backed from my attack and bit at the stones. I stepped back in the water and rubbed myself more. The dogs squatted on their haunches at a safe distance and bayed lugubriously at me and the moon in common.

The rest of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it continually rustled in my ear.

I took my blanket and went to lie on the hard ground, under the water waggon. There I heard the multitudinous insects of the night, and the whippoorwill.

Ordinarily I do not have an appetite for breakfast. That morning I thought I would eat little, but I ended by devouring six eggs, two dozen pancakes, drinking three cups of coffee ... all of which immediately lay like a lump of rock in me....

No, I could not keep it up! It was too much of an effort, such frightful labour, for sixteen hours of the day. But I thought of the old man who had jeered at me, and I trudged a-field with the rest, my fork slung over my shoulder ... sore ... I ached in every muscle ... muscles I never knew existed before talked to me with their little voices of complaint.

But after the first load I began to be better....

And by noon I was singing and whistling irrepressibly.

"You'll do ... but you'll have to put a hat on or you'll drop with sun-stroke," Bonton remarked.

"I never wear a hat."

"All right. It's your funeral, not mine," and the boss walked away.

* * * * *

"Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to do," suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.

"Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink."

The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt cool in the highest welter of heat.

In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.

"What's the matter?"

--"too hot!"

"Where's your whiskey now?"

--"'tain't the whiskey. _That_ keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm old, not young, like you," he contested stubbornly.

* * * * *

These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ... which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....

* * * * *

On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it ... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....

* * * * *

It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily threshing built up.

Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out into the straw....

One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were foundered....

* * * * *

The cramps bothered me no more.

The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.

"--thought you'd sag under," but, putting his hand on my back, "you've got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles ... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out."

* * * * *

After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me....

"Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!"

"--pay me off to-day?"

"Yes."

"What's the matter? ain't I working hard enough?"

"I've no fault to find with your work ... you're a better worker than most of the men ... in fact they complain that you set too hard a pace at the separator....

"But you argue too much ... keep the men up o' nights debating about things they never even considered before. And it upsets them so, what with the arguing and the sleep they lose, that they ain't up to the notch, next day.

"No, that's the only fault I have to find in you," he continued, as he counted out sixty dollars into my hand ... "but," and he walked with me, disquieted to the road, "but if you'll wait around till this afternoon, I'll drive you back to town."

"No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk."

I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure, longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university "stack."

"You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work. I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....

"I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?... Oh, no,--for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be assailed by all hands....

"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no one cared ... but now you've started something."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton."

"It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear."

* * * * *