Chapter XIII: Part 13

The professors sat bored and mute on the platform beside him, while he evacuated the forty-year-old wheeze of "your great-great-great-grandfather might have been a monkey, but, thank God, mine was not!" he won the usual great response of handclapping and laughter with this....

And then he held out a glass of water, to prove that miracles might happen, because God, being omnipotent, could, at will, suspend natural laws.

"Look at this glass of water. I hold it out at arm's length, so. If I did not hold it, it would drop to the floor and shatter into pieces. Thus I, by a human act, suspend the law of gravitation ... so God!--" There was huzzaing and applause. Several professors uneasily shifted the crossing of their knees ... one or two stared diplomatically at the ceiling.

I grew angry and sent forth several sharp hisses before I knew what I was doing ... the effect was an electric stillness for the moment. Then a roar of indignant applause drowned my protest. And I stopped and remained quiet, with much craning of necks about me, to look at me.

As the crowd poured out, I ran out into the road, from group to group, and, wherever I found a professor walking along, I vociferated my protest at our allowing such a back-water performance at the State's supposed centre of intelligence.

"But, Gregory, it makes no difference ... the argument is settled, let platform orators like Bryan tilt at windmills all they may."

"The hell it doesn't make a difference! if you professors are worth your salt, you won't let a Chautauqua man get by with such bunco."

* * * * *

The writing of my fairy drama progressed amain.

I mailed a copy of it to Penton Baxter, who said that it had genuine merit. Was not great, but showed great promise.

Henry Belton, from London, wrote me that it was beautiful and fine, but too eccentric for production in even the eccentric theatre.

And Belton kept deluging me with Single Tax pamphlets. And I wrote him hot letters in reply, villifying the Single Tax theory and upholding revolutionary Socialism. And he grew angry with me, and informed me that he had meditated keeping me in his patronage longer, but I was so obdurate that he would end my remittance with the six months ... as, in fact, was all that was originally promised me.

I replied that it made no difference ... that I would be always grateful to him. His letters stopped. The money stopped. But I went on living at the Y.M.C.A., charging up rent ... said that I was nearing the end of my rope again, glad because I had shown to myself that I was capable of sustained creative effort.

* * * * *

Many well-known men came to Laurel for lectures to the students.

Lyman Abbott appeared.

"The ancient bell-wether of the Standard Oil," Travers irreverently dubbed him.

The College Y.M.C.A. accorded him a reception. I was one of those invited to meet him.

After he had delivered a brief talk on God and The Soul, questions were invited--meant only to be politely put, that the speaker might shine. But my question was not put for the sake of social amenity ... though I'll admit, just a little for the sake of showing off.

"Dr. Abbott," I asked, "it is quite possible that there are other worlds in the sky--that, also, the rest of the planets either are or will be, homes for souls, for living beings equal to or higher than our present human grade of development?"

"Yes, yes, that is quite probable."

"Well, then, God, to prove a just God, would have to send his Son to be crucified a million times--once for each world ... for, if He did not, then the souls on these worlds would either be damned without a chance for salvation, or, if God made an exception in their case, that would be an unfair deal--for us to suffer from a fault other worlds are free of."

Dr. Abbott hemmed and hawed.

"It is not yet proven that there are other inhabited worlds. I an only dealing with questions of practical theology," he answered, with some heat and an attempt to be sarcastic.

The members of the Y.M.C.A. were indignant at me for putting a maladroit question.

"It doesn't do to invite Gregory anywhere. You can't tell what stuff he might pull."

"A legitimate question--" egged on Travers at my side, "bump the old boy again, Johnnie."

But I was not given another chance. After a short but painful silence the Secretary rose and put a suave and stereotyped query ... and others filled the breach in rapid succession. And the prestige of the great theologian was salvaged.

Commencement day approached. There came to deliver the address for the day, George Harvey, then editor of _Harper's Weekly_. Travers was assigned to interview Harvey....

"The fellow's a pompous big stiff," complained Jack, "the kind that makes a fetish of morning and evening dress ... wears kid gloves ... and a top hat ... he has both valet and secretary with him."

"That's no disgrace. Don't you think, Jack, that we Middle-Westerners only make fun of such people and their habits for the reason that we're either unable to do the same, or do not dare do it because of our jealousy of each other--our so-called hick democratic spirit?"

"There's a lot of truth in that. But fundamentally I would say that the newspaper editors who are here this week, holding a conference and tendering Harvey a banquet, _mean_ their plainness of dress and life ... and do not hanker after the clubman's way of life as Harvey represents it to their eyes ... you just watch for what Ed. Lowe and Billy Dorgan do to our Eastern chap at the banquet ... they'll kid him till he's sick."

That banquet will live in the memory of Kansas newspapermen.

Harvey, when he entered the hall where the journalists were already seated, first snapped his top hat sidewise to his attending valet. Then he sat down grandly.

Billy Dorgan and Ed. Lowe "rode Harvey around," as Jack phrased it. The distinguished editor, with his solemnity, invited thrusts. Besides, most of those present were what was denominated as "progressive" ... Jarvis Alexander Mackworth was there ... and Alden ... and Tobbs, afterward governor.

* * * * *

The next day Travers printed a supposititious interview with Harvey's English valet on how it felt to be a valet of a great man. Both the valet and Harvey waxed furious, it was said.

* * * * *

Arthur Brisbane visited us. He ran down from Kansas City over night. This man was Jack Travers' God ... and we of the Press or Scoop Club--a student newspaper club of which I had recently been made a member--also looked up to him as a sort of deity.

Travers informed me reverentially that Brisbane was so busy he always carried his stenographer with him, even when he rode to the Hill in an auto ... dictating an editorial as he drove along.

"A great man ... a very great man."

I won merit with Travers by reciting an incident of my factory life. Every afternoon the men in my father's department would bring in Brisbane's latest editorial to me ... and listen to me as I read it aloud. To have the common man buy a newspaper for its editorials--that was a triumph.

And Brisbane's editorials frequently touched on matters that the mob are supposed not to be interested in ... stories of the lives of poets, philosophers, statesmen....

One of the men who could barely read ... who ran his fingers along the lines as he read, asked me--

"Who was this guy SO-krats?"

It was an editorial on Socrates and his life and death that brought forth the enquiry ... after I had imparted to him what information I possessed:

"Where can I find more about him, and about that pal of his, Plato?"

* * * * *

I was hanging on to my comfortable room at the Y.M.C.A. by bluff. I had not let on to the secretary that my Belton subsidy had stopped. Instead, I affected to be concerned about its delay. But I did this, not to be dishonest, but to gain time ... I was attempting to write tramp stories, after the manner of London, and expected to have one of them accepted soon, though none ever were....

Decker, the student-proprietor of the restaurant where I ate every day, was more astute.

"Now look here, Gregory, you just can't run your bill up any higher."

I already owed him fifteen dollars.

I compounded with him by handing him over my _Illustrated History of English Literature_. It was like tearing flesh from my side to part with these volumes.

And now I had no more credit at the Y.M.C.A.

And I went back to Frank Randall, to apply again for my old room over his shop. He was using it now to store old stoves in. But he moved them out.

With a sense of despair, compensated by a feeling of sacrifice for my poetry, I found myself once more back over the tinshop, the hammers sounding and crashing below.

Old Blore, the cancer doctor, lived in a room in the front. All day long he sat drinking rum and sugar ... and shipping out his cancer cure, a white mixture like powdered sugar. Whether it did any good or not, he believed in it himself....

I have not written about him before ... there are so many odd characters that I came in contact with that I have not written about ... for this book is about myself....

But old Blore ... he came waddling back to me, drunk, as usual, on his rum and sugar.

"Welcome back, Johnnie ... come on, you and Frank, into my room ... we've got to celebrate your return."

Frank and I set down the stove we were moving, dusted our hands off, and followed.

"But I won't drink any of your rum, Ed! It's got too much of a kick."

"--nonsense ... good Jamaica rum never hurt nobody."

We drank several rounds of rum and water, with sugar. And we jocosely joined together in singing the cancer doctor's favourite hymn--"We're drifting down the stream of time, we haven't got long to stay."

Then Frank and Ed. retailed to me the practical jokes they had played on each other since I had been gone from among them ... on big Sam, the chocolate-coloured shoemaker who had his shop next door ... and an obscene one on a half-wit named Elmer, who was one of Frank's helpers ... that, though it was pretty raw, made me choke and gasp with merriment ... and they told me how, one night, they had wired the iron roof in the back, so that about ten cats that were mewling and quarrelling there, received a severe electric shock ... how funny and surprised they'd acted.

* * * * *

Most serviceably a check from the _National Magazine_ came, for twenty-five dollars ... I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships. The check ameliorated my condition. I saw my way clear to a few weeks more of regular eating.

* * * * *

Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came....

"Am on my way West. Will stop off visit you at Laurel--Penton."

* * * * *

Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City _Star_.

"KANSAS POET HONOURED
------------------------
AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM"

I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had written the _Les Miserables_ of the American workingman.

* * * * *

Harry Varden, editor of the _Cry for Right_, had been to Laurel a week previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at the house of the "comrade" where he was passing the night. The comrade sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.

Varden's monthly magazine _The World to Be_, had occasionally printed a poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.

Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion, even against himself.

I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him on one of his lecture trips....

After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ... reverently and with awe.

"Yes, yes," Varden assented, "Penton is all you say, but he has no sense of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad way, for a reformer, you know--gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so many good openings....

"When Penton was writing _The Slaughter House_ and we were running it serially, his protagonist, Jarl--it seemed he didn't know how to dispose of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired him 'for God's sake kill Jarl.' ...

"Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ... and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book."

And Harry Varden laughed excitedly like a boy, and he leaned sideways and smote his half-bent, sharp, skinny knee with his left hand. I could perceive that that was a grotesque platform gesture of his, when he drove a comic point home.

* * * * *

I was waiting at the station ... where I had shaken hands with Bob Fitzsimmons, and had seen Emma Silverman off....

Penton Baxter was due on the eleven o'clock train from Kansas City.

I surely must be on the road to becoming somebody, with all these famous people taking such an interest in me. I remembered Emerson's dictum about waiting in one's own doorway long enough, and all the world would come by.

Was I to be disappointed? It did not seem credible that the great man would make a special stop-off on his way to the coast, just to pay me a visit.

One after another the passengers stepped down and walked and rode away. Then a little, boyish-looking man ... smooth-faced, bright-complexioned, jumped down, wavered toward me, dropping his baggage ... extended his hand ... both hands ... smiling with his eyes, that possessed long lashes like a girl's.

"Are you Johnnie Gregory?"

"Penton Baxter?" I asked reverently. He smiled in response and drew my arm through his.

"This is great, this is certainly great," he remarked, in a high voice, "and I'm more than glad that I stopped off to see you."

He expanded in the sun of my youthful hero-worship.

"Where's the best hotel in town?"

"The Bellman House ... but I've arranged with the Sig-Kappas to put you up."

"Are you a fraternity man?"

"No--a barb."

"I'd rather go to the hotel you named ... but thank the boys for me."

I contended with Penton Baxter for the privilege of carrying his two grips. They were so heavy that they dragged my shoulders down, but, with an effort, I threw my chest out, and walked, straight and proud, beside him.

As we walked he questioned and questioned. He had the history of Laurel University, the story of my life, out of me, almost, by the time we had covered the ten blocks to the hotel.

"Penton Baxter!" I whispered in a low voice to the proprietor, who, as he stood behind the desk, dipped the pen with a flourish, and shoved the open register toward his distinguished guest.

* * * * *

Travers, of course, was the first to see the great novelist. He wired an interview to the _Star_, and wrote a story for the Laurel _Globe_ and the _Laurelian_.

Baxter said he would stay over for two days ... that he didn't want to do much beside seeing me ... that he would place himself entirely in my hands. I was beside myself with happy pride.

"This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the South East."

"We call it Azure Mound."

"Has it any historical interest?"

"--don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's company."

Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Shelley as he traipsed along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ... unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....

His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth was loose and cruel--like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair on an old maid's face.

More than a year later his wife confided to me that "Pennie," as she dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....

Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a rising tide of invisible opposition.

I discoursed of a new religion--a non-ascetic one based on the individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life--that I meditated inaugurating as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His face lit with frolic....

Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.

Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest, Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.

Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how, at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators ... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public office.... "Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his shoes to his hat...."

"Suppose, Mr. President," Baxter had put to him, at the same time expressing his amazement at the president's open manner of speech before men he had never even met before ... men perhaps of antagonistic shades of opinion, "suppose I should go out from here and give to the newspapers the things you have just said! How would you protect, defend yourself?"

"Young man, if you did--_as you won't_--" smashed Roosevelt, with his characteristic of clenched right fist brought down in the open palm of the left hand--"if you did--I'd simply brand you as a liar ... and shame you before the world."

"And so it was that Roosevelt expressed himself freely ... and at the same time protected himself."

* * * * *

We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it had been a hard climb.

At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State.

The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us.

"God, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it."

"Walt Mason?" I enquired, mischievously....

"No," he responded, seriously, "Walt Whitman."

"But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide, scenic vistas....

"Nevertheless," I went on, "Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we have Carrie Nation--"

"And Johnnie Gregory!" put in Baxter.

"I don't want just to belong to Kansas."

It was I who was humourless now, "I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois ideals ... I want to belong to the world--as--you do!"

We trudged back to town.

"What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!"

* * * * *

My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke.

I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making ... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered themselves slighted.

When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our first names.

"Good-bye, Johnnie!"

"Good-bye, Penton!"

"Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so conveniently."

I assured him that I would not fail.

For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_.

"My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry already."

* * * * *

The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one, and I had not followed even that closely.

"If you'll graduate," Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the Kansas fashion, "I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't believe in you, and, frankly,--say it was a mistake ever to have let you in."

Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.

"In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a detriment to the school."

"And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?"

"Yes, God pity me, I did," he jested. "I remembered how I was asked to quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were classmates....

"I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!... but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus ... it might make them more alive and interesting."

Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I sold to _Everybody's_ kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month. I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.

There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off before her, at the same time.

The Copperwell Street Show came to town. They lined the main street with booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them except at peril of his life. A gold medal was offered to anyone who would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience from the inside of the cage.

I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal's equivalent in money. I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.

I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....

"JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE
------------------------
KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,"

Jack Travers was at his facetious best.

Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia Britannica....

People looked at me both with amusement and admiring amazement as they saw me about, late that afternoon....

"Now tell me the honest truth about the lions," I asked of the trainer.

"They're a pretty bad lot."

"Come on. I've made up my mind to go in, and I'm not afraid."

"--though lions are not as bad as leopards and tigers ... there's no telling when they might jump you ... there's only one chance in a thousand that they will ... but you may bring one up from being a cub ... and, one morning, because of something you can't read in its animal mind--it not liking its breakfast or something--it may jump you, give one crunch, and snuff you out like a candle ... it's that chance that you take that makes it seem brave."

"Thanks, I'll take the chance."

"Are you sure you'll have enough command of yourself to make a speech?"

"--Certain ... I've committed to memory almost all the Encyclopedia Britannica article on lions ... I'm going to give them that...."

* * * * *

"Gregory! Gregory!" the crowd was calling, half in derisive jocularity, half in uneasy admiration....

The trainer shunted me into the cage, after seating his lions in a half-moon on their tubs.

"Quick! Step in! We'll be on the outside ready with hot irons in case anything goes wrong!"

I didn't know whether the trainer was jesting or serious.

"Don't think of them at all. They'll sit still ... you can turn your back to them and face the audience. It will be safe. Only don't make any unexpected, quick motions."

I was in among them. The door clanged behind me.

Nobody jeered now. All was filled with an expectant hush.

Then, as if strange and a-far from myself, I stepped easily into the very centre of the half moon of squatting beasts, and made my speech ... at the end, there was hardly any applause till I was safely out of the cage ... Then there was a tumult. Shouts, cat-calls, whoops, and a great noise of hearty hand-clapping.

I stood beside the ropes as the people of Laurel surged by, many of them shaking me by the hand ... Vanna came by, with the big football player with her, bulking behind her slight loveliness ... lightly she put a tiny, gloved hand in mine ... a glove neatly mended at the fingers ... congratulating me, half with feeling, half with amusement....

"That was reckless and brave, Mr. Gregory."

I was speechless with frightened delight over her words, and the pressure of her hand.

I turned to the trainer before I went to my room over the tin-shop.

"You say the leopards are most dangerous?"

"Yes."

"For twenty-five dollars a night I will go in with them, alone, and run them around with a whip." As I proposed this, in the background of my consciousness was the conviction that by so doing I could win Vanna's love....

"No ... the leopards are too uncertain."

* * * * *

The papers were full of my deed. And I was not made fun of, but commended. And it was announced (for advertising purposes only, of course) that the management of the show had approached me with an offer to travel as a trainer of wild animals.

The second night I was rather blase. I shook my finger playfully in the face of one of the seated lions ... to have a sensation of a thousand prickles running sharp through each pore, when the lion responded with an open, crimson-mouthed, yellow-fanged snarl; I smelt the carrion fetor of his breath. I stepped back rather quickly. All the animals grew restless and furtive. Little greenish-amber gleams lit and flickered in their eyes.

I pulled myself together. Deliberately I turned my back on them.

"--So you see plainly, ladies and gentlemen, that a lion is, after all, a much misrepresented, gentle beast."

The trainer was piqued when I walked out, that night.

"I don't want you to tell the people that my lions are harmless and gentle ... if you do that to-morrow night, I'll see to it that you get the medal, and not the money."

The afternoon of the following day, while the girl who trained the leopards was in the cage of the latter, they jumped on her, and tore her back with their claws. Dripping with blood, she whipped them back, inch by inch, into their living-cage, that led by a small door into the big one used for exhibitions. A shiver ran through me at the news of the girl's mishap. I was glad they had not taken me up as regards the leopards. And my being among the lions now also seemed less of a joke. At least, that last night, I felt it not to be, I delivered a constrained discourse and only breathed freely when outside their cage.

* * * * *

And in a few weeks my unique and single glory was snatched from me. The show had moved to Salina, and a barber in that town had shaved their keeper in the cage, while the lions sat around.

* * * * *

Before leaving for my projected summer as worker on the boats of the Great Lakes, I snatched at a passing adventure: the Kansas City _Post_ had me walk from Laurel to Kansas City with the famous walker, Weston.

The man was going across the continent a-foot. When he saw I was sticking the fifty miles or so with him, he became friendly and talked with me of the athletes of former days ... the great runners, walkers, fighters, oarsmen ... and he knew intimately also many well known journalists and literary men of whom he discoursed.

Time and again, like a bicycle pedalled too slow, he stepped awry on so small an obstacle as a cinder, and toppled over on his face like an automaton running down.

"No, no! Don't touch me. I must get up myself ... that's not in the game ..." his rising was a hard, slow effort ... he regained his feet with the aid of his metal-tipped cane....

"Keep back! Keep back!" to the people, gangs of curious boys mostly, who followed close on his heels. And he poked backwards with the sharp metallic point of the stick....

"People follow close on me, stupid, like donkeys. If I didn't keep that point swinging back, when I slacked my pace or stopped they would walk right up on me...."

* * * * *

Dr. Percival Hammond, managing editor of the New York _Independent_. the first magazine to print my poems, came to town ... to lecture on his favourite topic of international peace.

It occurred to me strongly that I ought to afford him some witness of my gratitude for what his magazine had done for me.

Though broke, I borrowed ten dollars from the owner of a lunch counter where I ate.

"I want to give a dinner to Dr. Hammond ... his magazine has helped me as a poet ... it is obvious that I can't give the dinner at your lunch counter."

Ten dollars was all the lunchcounter man would lend me.

But Walsh Summers of the Bellman House said I could give a luncheon in honour of Hammond at fifty cents a plate ... he would allot me two tables ... and a separate room ... and I could invite nineteen professors ... and he would throw in two extras for Jack Travers and myself.

I gave the lunch, inviting the professors I liked best.

After dessert and a few speeches I told them how I had borrowed the money. Hammond privately tried to pay me back out of his own pocket, but I wouldn't let him.

* * * * *

I asked Hammond if he knew Penton Baxter.

"Yes; we printed his first article, you know ... just as we gave you your start....

"Baxter is the most remarkable combination of genius and jackass I have ever run into. But don't ever tell him that I said that. He has no sense of humour ... everything is of equal import to him ... his toothache is as tragic as all the abuses of the capitalist system."

* * * * *

On the way to the Great Lakes there are several people I must stop and see, and show myself to.

I stop at Topeka and visit Dad Rother ... a columnist on a newspaper there, of more than local fame ... an obviously honest-to-God bachelor ... he is afflicted with dandruff and his hair is almost gone. He shows me photographs of Mackworth and of Uncle Bill Struthers, each autographed with accompanying homely sentiment.

I catch myself pretending an interest in Rother's column, but really actuated by a desire to plant myself in his mind, and to have a notice in his paper about me ... anything that Dad Rother has in his column is copied in all the Kansas papers.

* * * * *

I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the use of a typewriter.

But the stick or so put in the paper about my passing through Leavenworth pleases me.

General Fred Furniss is stationed at Fort Leavenworth. I must visit him.

* * * * *

General Furniss walked in rapidly as if executing a military manoevour, both hands held forth in welcome. He was "Napoleonic" in size, and, also like Napoleon, he carried too much belly in front of him. He wore a closely curling salt-and-pepper beard....

He commented on my "military carriage"--asked me if I had ever gone to a military academy....

I yielded to an instinct for deprecative horse-play, one of my worst faults, begot of an inferiority-complex.

"No, I've never gone to a military academy, but I've had a hole in the seat of my pants so generally, and I have had to walk erect so much to keep my coat tail well down to hide it, that that is where I acquired my military carriage."

The general's eyes twinkled.

"Take a chair. I have heard of you, Mr. Gregory ... I have watched your work, too. Roosevelt knows about it ... has spoken of it to me ... has remarked: 'there's a young fellow--your poet-chap in Kansas--that will be worth watching ... why is it, Fred, that every man of any talent whatever in Kansas, instantly gets the eye of the nation?... we're always expecting something big from William Allen White's State'."

* * * * *

A week or so of work for a Polish-Catholic farmer ... who locked me out of his house, when he and his family went to mass the one Sunday I was with him. He asked me if I wanted a book to read. As the only book he possessed was Thomas a Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_, I took it, and learned Christian humility, reading it, in the orchard. Surely this farmer was a practical Christian. He believed in his fellow man and at the same time gave him no opportunity to abuse his faith in him....

* * * * *

It was pleasant, this working for from a few days to a week, then sauntering on ... putting up at cheap little country hotels overnight. I liked it better than tramping....

I pitched hay, I loaded lumber, I dug, I planted, I reaped.

In lower Minnesota a Swedish emigrant farmer hired me to help him with his hay crop. He and I and his lanky son, Julius ... just coming out of adolescence ... we worked away from sun-up till moon-rise....

The first day I congratulated myself for working for that particular farmer. The meat at table was abundant and fresh.

But before my two weeks were up I had grown weary of the diet. They had killed a cow ... and cow-meat was what I found set before me morning, noon, and night,--every day. I complained about it to Julius ... "when we kill a cow ain't we got to eat it?" he replied.

Every afternoon we participated in a pleasant Swedish custom. The two women of the household, the mother and grandmother, with blue cloth rolled about their head for headgear, brought us coffee and cake a-field....

"Aeftermittagscaffee," they called it.

It refreshed us; we worked on after that till late supper by lamp, driving back to the house by moonlight.

* * * * *

At Duluth I found that a strike prevailed on the Lakes. I was held in doubt whether I ought to sail, for I would have to do so as strike-breaker, which was against my radical code ... but, then, I had come over-land all the way from Laurel, to voyage the Great Lakes for the poetry to be found there ... and I must put my muse above such things as strikes.

I signed on, on a big ore boat, as porter....

That means, as third cook; my task the washing and scouring of greasy pots, pans, and dishes ... and waiting on the firemen and deckhands at meals.

The _James Eads Howe_ took on a cargo of rust-coloured iron ore at Twin Harbours ... the gigantic machinery grided and crashed all night, pouring the ore into the hold, to the dazzling flare of electric lights....

Here for the first time I conceived myself to be caught in the great industrial turmoil. If I were to derive song from this, it would be song for giants, or rather, for machines that had grown to gigantic proportions from the insect world ... diminutive men made parts of their anatomy as they swung levers and operated cranes....

We kicked outward on the long drop down Lake Superior, the largest of the five Great Lakes. It was like an inland ocean. The water of it is always so cold that, when a ship is wrecked there, good swimmers who might otherwise keep up till rescued, often perish of the cold....

Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the water to escape the flames....

And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down, a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....

"That's a reflection of some real city," explained the tall Canadian-Scotch cook ... "once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky ...--thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving."

Half-way across to the Soo Canal we ran into my first lake-storm.

"The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor. He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land on every side."

Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears, and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic clang of coal as it shot from shovels....

The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.

I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars ... greeting with oaths and comic curses the awkward coal passer who spilled with his laden wheelbarrow into the slightly lower pit where they stood.

I quit the _James Eads Howe_ at Ashtabula, after several round trips in her, the length of the Lakes.

I freighted it to Chicago, where I shipped, again as porter, on a package freighter.

* * * * *

The captain of the package freighter _Overland_ should have been anything but a captain. He was a tall, flabby, dough-faced man, as timid as a child just out of the nursery.

We had taken on, as one of our firemen, a Canuck, who, from the first, boasted that he was a "bad man"....

He intimidated the cook right off. He punched in a glass partition to emphasise a filthy remark he had made to the head engineer. He went after me, to bully and domineer me, next.

It looked as if we were in for a hard voyage to the Georgian Bay.

The Canuck, at the very first meal, terrorised the crew that sat down with him. I looked him over carefully, and realised that something must be done.

He flung a filthy and gratuitous expression my way. Silently I stepped back from the mess room, untied my apron, and meant to go in and try to face him down. But at that juncture, my courage failed me, and instead of inviting the rough-neck out on deck, as I had tried to force myself to do, I hurried to the captain's cabin.

The captain said, "Come in!" to my knock. He was sitting, of all things, in dirty pajamas, at a desk ... though it was mid-day ... his flabby, grey-white belly exuded over his tight pajama waist-string ... the jacket of the pajamas hung open, with all but one button off.

I complained to the captain of the bully--repeated how he had bellowed at me to tell the unmentionable skipper he would receive his bumps bloody well, too, if the latter did not stick to his own part of the ship.

I saw fright in the captain's face....

"It's up to the chief engineer."

"Either that fellow goes off this ship or I do. You'll have to hire another third cook."

The boat was sailing in an hour.

I walked back for my few effects. But, on the way back, I took hold of myself and determined to stick by my guns. I made up my mind that I would not leave the boat, and that, at the first hostile move of the bully I would oppose him--besides, what had the fellow done, so far, besides chucking a bluff?

My opportunity to live up to my resolve came at mess for supper. There was a smoking platter of cabbage set before the boys.

"What the hell! Who wants to eat bloody cabbage."

And snatching up a handful of the dripping, greasy vegetable, he was about to fling it into the face of one of the men opposite, when, without giving myself a chance to hesitate, I stepped up quickly and grabbed the "bad man's" wrist. The cabbage went high and spattered all over the opposite wall.

The bully glared like an enraged bull at me.

"I'll--"

Quaking in my boots, I made my eyes glare level with his.

"Listen to me, bo," I bluffed, "I ain't much on guff, and I don't want specially to fight ... but I'm waiter in this mess room and you don't pull anything like this here, unless you do it over my dead body."

"That's just what I will do ... I'll--I'll--" and the chap, pale with what seemed insane rage, started to his feet.

"Ah, sit down!" I commanded, marvelling at my nerve, and pushing him violently by the shoulders back on the bench ... then, deliberately, I turned my back, and walked away, expecting any moment to have him on me like a clawing wild cat.

With seeming calm and nonchalance I made the kitchen. With a semblance of outward serenity I picked up a rag and returned to wipe off the wall. I was vastly relieved to find that the bluff had worked.

The Canuck was finishing his meal in silence.

From that moment till the end of the voyage he was as quiet and Unobtrusive as anyone could wish him to be....

* * * * *

I have a curious habit of often waking up in the night from deep slumber, and breaking into laughter over some funny incident or other that has happened to me a long time ago ... I have chuckled over this incident many times ... if that bully only knew how terrorised he really had me!...

* * * * *

It is impossible to describe the Georgian Bay and the beauty of its thousands of islands ... as we steamed through them in the dawn, they loomed about us through sun-golden violet mists.... Here as small as the chine of some swimming animal, there large enough for a small forest of trees to grow upon them....

* * * * *

Another storm ... on Lake Huron ... a fair-sized one.

I was walking along the deck, just after dawn, the waves riding and running and shattering aboard. I carried the dinner bell, was ringing it for breakfast ... when the greatest wave I have ever seen on the Lakes came running, high-crested, toward the boat,--that seemed to know what was happening, for it rose to meet it, like a sentient being....

The wave smashed ... hit the galley and washed over the top of it, catching me in a cataract as I hugged close. I was driven hard against the taut cable wire that made our only railing. For a moment I thought the water reaching up from over-side as the vessel lurched would clutch me and suck me down.

A close and breathless call. A rending, splintering sound told me damage had been done. I looked toward the captain's cabin ... and laughed heartily, for all my discomfort and dangerous escape ... for the whole side of the cabin had been stove in,--and, terrified, his eyes sticking out, in his dirty underclothes the captain had been hurtled forth, his face still stupid from sleep though full of fear.

I rushed up to him. His drawers sagged pitiably with wet.

"A close shave, sir!" I remarked.

When I brought him his breakfast he was still trembling.

* * * * *

I left the package freighter _Overland_. It was almost time for the new school year. But Warriors' River lay in my way back to Laurel, and I determined to stop off and pay a visit to Baxter, at Barton's Health Home....

* * * * *

I was disappointed with my summer. In terms of poetic output. I had written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and these were barely publishable in the _National Magazine._ I realise now that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for game. It cannot be deliberately sought and found. It must just happen.

Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words. I knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon. And there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full, just-risen moon, over Huron....

I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ... for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the _National_, and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them.

But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin came into the coal-passer's eyes. Then I had been ashamed of myself ...

"Of course I'll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!" I slid into my pants and went up the ladder--

To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud ... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled, with an ecstasy of quivering silver....

I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of expression,--with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved, a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or sunset.

* * * * *

I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the Health Home. These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building. I think the tents were even wired for electric light.

Baxter welcomed me. But I took a room for a week in town, though he urged me to stay with him. But when I had the means I liked better to be independent. I calculated living a week in Warriors' River for ten or twelve dollars. That would leave me thirty dollars over, from what I had earned while working on the _Overland_.

Then, back to the university for my last year of leisurely study and reading, in the face of the desolate poverty that would have defeated many another man, but to which I was used as a customary condition. After that--Paris or London, or both! Kansas was growing too small for me.

* * * * *

I have mentioned that Baxter had a head too large for his body. Daniel, his son, slight and frail and barely eight years of age, possessed the same characteristic....

I footed it out to Baxter's tents, faithfully as to a shrine, each afternoon. The mornings he and I both occupied in writing. He, on a novel which was the story of the love-life of his wife and himself, and of his literary struggles, called _Love's Forthfaring_; I, on my abortive songs of the Great Lakes that all came forth still-born ... because I was yet under the vicious literary influence of the _National Magazine_, and was writing my verse, trying to be inspired by the concepts of middle-class morality ... or what was even worse, I was attempting to glorify the under-dog; who, if he were the demigod Socialists portray him, would by no means remain the under-dog.

* * * * *

I found Baxter more a-flame than ever for the utter reformation of mankind ... in the way they dressed ... stiff collars hurt the nervous system, pressing as they did, on the spine ... in the books they read ... he wished to start a library that would sell cheaply and bring all the world's great thought and poetry into factory, and every worker's home ... all conventional ideas of marriage and religion must go by the board and freedom in every respect be granted to men and women.

It was good to listen to this sincere, naive man, still young ... who would re-make life nearer to the beauty and harmony that Shelley also dreamed for mankind. I lived in a state of perpetual reverence toward Baxter. This man tried to live his ideals, as well as write about them.

In matters of diet I accepted Baxter's theories but, humanly, did not live up to them. He was a vegetarian.