Chapter XXI: Down Cataract Mountain

VACHEL told me once, to save his self-respect, he took a job in Chicago in a department store at seven dollars a week, and was employed in the wholesale toy department; a whole block of toys, where was to be found every imaginable plaything for young and old, from dolls as large as three-year-old children to family portrait albums that, having a musical box in their binding, played “The Old Folks at Home” and various hymn-tunes when you opened them. He told how a lad called Timmins wound up all the albums he could lay his hands on, and laid them open and went away to another part of the building, and of the wild din that ensued.

Timmins was “fired.”

He told how he lived amid acres of dolls and how, to satisfy the fire insurance inspectors, a three-foot clearance was made between the top of the toy heaps and the roof, and how all one night they did overtime slamming down rows and sections of dolls and toys on to waiting trucks, and they were rushed to another place. Then the inspectors came and passed the building. And when they were gone the Ghetto came and bought the “bum dolls” from the “smash dump,” and Vachel and the rest were soon building toys up to the roof once more.

* * * * *

“BUT none of my friends liked my earning my living in this way. They’d prefer to see me in a bank or an insurance office. You see, I could not paint a picture that would keep me. I would not enter commercial art--I mean advertisement drawing. My poems did not sell, and people thought I had spent long enough studying and loafing, and that I ought to begin to earn a decent living. So I went into the Chicago Department Store. They did not like that. So I took to the road again. Curiously enough, Francis Hackett took a job in that same store before his star arose.”

Vachel and I had a great pow-wow by night and morning fire, and I cannot set down half here in these (I hope) dignified paragraphs. But all the while we sat and talked, the prairie rats sat about us on their tails and haunches, and stared curiously with their forepaws on their chests like good masons in their rituals. They smelt the beans, they smelt the cheese, they smelt the corn-beef hash; they knew they were protected by the United States Government and they had never seen a dog or a cat. Curiously friendly little companions!

After the cloudy night there was a serene morning. When the veils were lifted off the mountains we knew them for just what they were. They did not go all the way to the sky after all.

We went down Cataract Mountain the same way as the water, down to flower-spread meads and spacious fir-woods and widening streams. Up above us the water chariots came racing behind white horses four abreast, five abreast, natural fountains played on every hand, and high as heaven itself tiny cataracts tipped over and fell downwards into veils, into smoke, into nothingness. Characteristic of the place were the great volumes of water which plunged under hollow snow-crusts to emerge forty feet lower down after a momentary vigil in the snow. This is the valley of Cataract Creek, bounded by lofty and perhaps impassable rocks, but in itself a garden to the last patch of mould and the last bright flower.

* * * * *

WE made our way along Haystack Butte toward Mount Grinnell, which, like a mighty fortress, stood facing us in the line of our tramp. Was it the beauty of the garden or was it the limpidity of the streams that set us talking of England? It is a peculiarly happy subject with the poet, who, with all his Americanism, has a true reverence for the fountain of English. This July, just before setting out for the Rockies, he received an invitation from Robert Bridges, the British poet laureate, to become a member of the “Society for Pure English.” To that extent has Oxford at least recognised that Vachel Lindsay is no mere performer or charlatan and not the “jazz-poet.” To some people in England Vachel came as a prophet, and his courtly and, indeed, stately manners, the profound obeisance which he made with his hat before entering a church or a school or a house, revealed him as an American of the Washingtonian cast.

Some would-be cynical, smart undergraduate was showing Vachel King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, and said to him: “The last American we showed round when we asked him what he thought of it, said, ‘Some God-box.’” And he seemed to think that very amusing, and could not understand Lindsay’s silence on the point.

“He did not know for how many years I had lectured on the Gothic and what it meant to me,” said Vachel.

Naturally, I chaffed my companion not a little on his belonging to the S.P.E., and called him to order whenever the arduousness of our campaign prompted him to break across the pure classic of Shakespeare’s tongue, and I made him take note of many expressions, such as “being wished on,” and “handing a man the canned goods,” which I bade him chase from America into the sea.

“I should only be too glad, Stephen,” said he, “if I could get rid of ‘motivate’ and a man’s ‘implications’ and ‘the last analysis’ and ‘the twilight zone’ and ‘canned metaphor’ and the dollar adjectives, a ‘ten-million-dollar building’ and a ‘million-dollar bride.’”

_Oxford has asked Chicago
To lend its purifying aid
To the King’s English.
O Oxford! O Bridges!_

XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”

“NOW, Horace Greeley----” said Vachel, opening his “morning strafe” of political conversation.

“Who the ---- was he?”

“You don’t know? Why, you’ll be saying you don’t know Shakespeare next. That’s as if J. C. Squire had never heard of Edwin Booth.”

“Well, who was he?”

“He edited the _Tribune_ throughout the Civil War.”

“That all?”

“He said, ‘The way to resume is to resume.’”

“That all?”

“He said, ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,’ and printed it at the head of his newspaper every day.”

“Oh! Did you ever hear of Mudford?”

“No.”

“What, never heard of Mudford, the famous editor of the _Standard_?”

“No.”

“Ever heard of Nicol Dunn?”

“No.”

“He edited the _Morning Post_ in its better days. Ever heard of Frederick Greenwood?”

“No.”

“Never heard of Frederick Greenwood? Why, he was the greatest journalist England ever produced. He inspired Disraeli with the idea of buying the Suez Canal. If we don’t know about your journalists, I see you don’t know about ours.”

The battery was silenced.

* * * * *

WE walked through five miles of rotten-ripe red raspberries and got thorns in our half-naked knees and carmined our fingers with raspberry juice, and we kept spitting out unpalatable fruits and making uncomplimentary remarks. Then we got to open pine woods and freed our feet of the tangles, and Vachel began to sing softly to himself a children’s processional hymn:

We are the Magi,
Children though we are.
We are the wise men,
Following the star.

“There are only two of us.” I ventured. “Where do you think the third king has got to?”

“That’s King Christopher,” said Vachel, sadly. “That’s our ‘other wise man.’ He is with us, but he’s invisible. He is sitting in Greeley Square or Vesey Street, and it was thinking of him that really started me on Horace Greeley.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he said to all the young Magi, ‘quit seeking a star in the East, Go West and grow up with the country. Get into America; find your spiritual roots.’”

“You want to persuade every one to cross the Appalachians?”

“Yes,” said Vachel dreamily. “So I brought him along invisibly. He is our invisible playmate.” And he resumed his children’s hymn.

“You’re a good bit like Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling,” said Vachel to me at last, “You’ve a wonderful geographical background. You ought to read the life of Mark Twain. Very interesting. He was made by his life in Nevada. His life in the silver mining camps and his knowledge of the West and the South made him. Read _Roughing It_. It’s a great book. Then Kipling with a boyhood in India and a maturity in America owes much to his knowing both West and East. What’s the matter with young men to-day is a disinclination to get their feet dirty. You’re the only man in England or America I’ve been able to persuade to go on a tramp with me. When I proposed it to M----, the English poet, he seemed to turn pale. That’s all behind me,” he said, “though I don’t know what he meant.”

* * * * *

WE came within sight of the shore of Lake Josephine. “Shall we ask our invisible companion if he’d like to come in for a swim with us?” said I.

“Why, that would be fine.”

So we broke through to the green and silver lake and, putting our tender feet on the sharp stones and water-covered boulders, waded out to swimming depth and we made a great splash with Napoleon’s beautiful bride. And when we came we vagabondised on the shore for the rest of the day--the three of us--lying stretched out beside a mounting red blaze of rain-washed wood.

The beach was all of little mauve stones which we raked into couches. And there we lay munching hot pea-nuts and rebuilding the world on a foundation of the American Wild West. Vachel drew some more world-maps and adopted our invisible playmate as a member of the society of “astrological geographers,” and we took for our emblem and device the map of the two hemispheres with the motto, “The World is My Parish.”

What a serene evening it was by the side of fair Josephine! A half moon rose over us at nightfall and marsh hens sped through the air in volleying groups of wings. The stars and the moon threw a silver radiance on the line of the mountain-tops and on the forests and on the dimples and lines and circles of the lake. We fell asleep and were warm and at peace. We only waked at four in the morning and then bathed before sunrise and mingled our bodies with the perfect reflections of green and grey and brown and snowy mountain-sides.

The sun arising grew upon us and chased wraith-like mists across the waters, and our fire, hotter than the sun, blazed on the mauve stones and baked us and dried us when we came out to it, and gave us our coffee and gave us all we needed till old Sol was radiant o’er the scene.

_We know about Josephine
What Napoleon did not know.
He was too preoccupied sacking cities
To love the beautiful altogether,
Killing men, counting cannon, putting unneeded
Crowns upon his brothers’ heads.
He didn’t know much about her,
O no!
He said there were no more Alps,
No more Pyrenees.
He never said there were no more Rocky Mountains._