Chapter 16

"You see, Gregory, if you win two of these races, we'll get the banner that goes to the class that makes the greatest number of points ... you must do it for us ... we have never yet won the banner, and this is our last chance."

They left, solemnly shaking my hand, as over a matter of vast importance....

Hurrying into my track suit, I went out to the Oval. It was three days before the meet.

Dunn was there, with several others, measuring out distances and chalking lanes.

With all the delicate joy of an aesthete I took my slim, spiked running shoes. I patted them with affection as I pushed my feet into them. I removed the corks from the shining spikes....

I struck out with long, low-running, greyhound strides ... around and around ... the wind streamed by me....

I knew I was being watched admiringly. I could see it out of the tail of my eyes. So I threw forward in a final sprint, that brought me up, my eyes stinging with the salt of sweat, my legs aching ... my chest heaving....

"Good boy," complimented Dunn, coming up to me, and patting me on the back ... Gregory, I'm _for_ you. I'm so glad you've come out a clean, fine, clear-cut Christian."

* * * * *

For the two-mile, the half, and the mile, each--a single athlete was training, his heart set on the record. It seemed impossible that I should win all three races. Yet I did.

I was all nerves and sinews for the two-mile. The night before I had lain awake. I could not sleep so I read a poor translation of the odes of Pindar. But behind the bad verbiage of the translator, I fed on the shining spirit of the poetry. With Pindar's music in me, I was ready for the two-mile.

* * * * *

Tensely we leaned forward, at the scratch. I had my plan of campaign evolved. I would leap to the fore, at the crack of the pistol, set a terrific pace, sprint the first quarter, and then settle into my long, steady stride, and trust to my good lung power ... for I had paid special attention to my lung-development, at "Perfection City."

I felt a melting fire of nervousness running through my body, a weakness.

I bowed my face in my hands and prayed ... both to Christ and to Apollo ... in deadly seriousness ... perhaps all the gods really were....

The gun cracked. Off I leapt, in the lead ... in the first lap the field fell behind.

"Steady, Gregory, steady!" advised Dunn, in a low voice, as I flashed into the second....

I thought I had distanced everybody ... but it chilled me to hear the soft swish, swish of another runner ... glancing rapidly behind, I saw a swarthy lad, a fellow with a mop of wiry, black hair, whom we called "The Hick" (for he had never been anywhere but on a farm)--going stride for stride, right in my steps, just avoiding my heels....

Run as I might, I couldn't shake him off....

Every time I swept by, the crowd would set up a shout ... but now they were encouraging "The hick" more than me. This made me furious, hurt my egotism. My lungs were burning with effort ... I threw out into a longer stride. I glanced back again. Still the chap was lumbering along ... but easily, so easily ... almost without an effort....

"Good God, am I going to be beaten?" I sensed a terrific sprinting-power in the following, chunky body of my antagonist.

There were only two more laps ... the rest of the field were a lap and a half behind, fighting for third place amongst themselves ... jeered at by the instinctive cruelty of the onlookers....

My ears perceived a cessation of the following swish, the tread. Simultaneously I heard a great shout go up. I dared not look back, however, to see what was happening--I threw myself forward at that shout, fearing the worst, and ran myself blind....

* * * * *

"Take it easy, you have it!"

"Shut up! he's after the record."

* * * * *

The shrill screaming of the girls who had come over, in a white, linen-starched wagon load, from Fairfield, gave me my last spurt. Expecting every moment to hear my antagonist grind past me, on the cinders, I sped up the home-stretch.

The air was swimming in a gold mist. I felt arms under mine, and I was carried off to the senior tent, by my class-mates....

Yet I am convinced that I would have been beaten, if my rival had not had the string that held his trunks up, break. He had sunk down on the track, when they had fallen, not to show his nakedness ... and, pulling them up, and holding them, amid great laughter, he had still won second ribbon.

* * * * *

I won the second race--the half-mile, without the humour of such a fateful intervention. It was my winning of the first that won me the second. I had just equalled the two-mile record, in the first....

I ran that half, blindly, like a mad man. I was drunk with joy over my popularity ... for when I had gone into the big dining room for lunch, all the boys had shouted and cheered and roared, and pounded the dishes with their knives.

* * * * *

"Now, Gregory, you've just got to take the mile away from Learoyd ... he's a junior ... you've just _got_ to!... besides, if you don't ... there's Flammer has lost the broad jump ... and we won't win the class banner after all."

Learoyd was a smallish, golden-faced, downy-headed boy ... almost an albino.... I had seen him run ... he ran low to the ground, in flashes, like some sort of shore-bird.

* * * * *

In the class-tent, alone. Dunn had driven my class out, where they had been massaging and kneading my legs ... which trembled and tottered under me, from the excessive use they had already undergone.

I sat down and put my head between my knees, and groaned. Then I straightened out my right leg and rubbed it, because a cramp was knotting it.

"Hello, Gregory!"

The tent-flap opened. The athletic director poked his head in.

"Come on, Gregory, we're waiting for you."

"Wait a minute, Smythe ... I want to pray," I replied simply. Reverently he withdrew ... impressed ... awed....

I flung myself on my face.

"Look here, God, I'll really believe in you, if you give me this last race ... it will be a miracle, God, if you do this for me, and I will believe in your Bible, despite my common sense ... despite history ... despite Huxley and Voltaire," then, going as far as I could--"yes, and despite Shelley ... dear God, dear Christ, please do what I have asked."

My hand struck on a bottle of witch hazel as I rose. Impulsively, I drank off half the contents. It sent a warmth through me. I straightened up, invigorated.

"Come on, Gregory ... what's the matter?" it was Dunn, protesting, "we'll have to run off the mile without you, if you don't come."

"I'm ready ... I'm coming."

* * * * *

All that I had in my head, when the pistol cracked, was to _run!_ ... all I felt about me was only a pair of mad legs.

I licked out, neither seeing nor caring ... almost feeling my way along the rim of the track with my toes, as I ran--as if I had racing eyes in them. There was a continuous roar that rose and fell like the sea. But I neither saw nor heeded. I just ran and ran.

On the home-stretch a fellow came breast to breast with me. It was Learoyd ... running low like a swallow skimming the ground. But it didn't worry me. I was calm, just floating along, it seemed to me.

I saw Dunn throwing his camera into the air, in the forefront of the seething crowd. He was crying for me to come on. The camera fell in a smashed heap, unregarded.

Barely, with my chest flung out, I took the tape ... trailing off ... I ran half a lap more, with my class leaping grotesquely and shouting, streaming across field after me--before I had my senses back again, and realised that the race was over.

"Did I win? Did I win? Did I win?" I asked again and again.

"Yes, you won!"

I was being carried about on their shoulders.

"A little more, and we'd have to take you over to the hospital," commented Smythe, as he looked at me, while I lay prone on my back, resting, under shelter of the tent.

"Who--who used up all this witch-hazel?" he asked of the rubbers....

I hid my face in the grass, pretending to groan from the strain I had just undergone. Instead, I was smothering a laugh at myself ... at the school ... at all things....

"God and witch-hazel," I wanted to shout hysterically, "hurrah for God and witch-hazel."

Then I rose shakily to my feet, and, flinging myself loose from those who offered to help me, I ran at a good clip, in my sneakers, dangling my running shoes affectionately--to my solitary room ... with a bearing that boasted, "why, I could run all those three races over again, one right after the other, right now ... no, I'm not tired ... not the least bit tired!"

That night, in the crowded dining hall, the ovation for me was tremendous.

"I'll smash life just like those races," I boasted, in my heart.

But my triumph and eminence were not to last long.

To be looked up to at Mt. Hebron you had to lead a distasteful, colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen anywhere before. Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never found more pettiness. First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself where you had arrived.

I could not stand my half self-hypnotised hypocrisy any longer. A spirit of mischief and horseplay awoke in me. I perpetrated a hundred misdemeanours, most of them unpunishable elsewhere, but of serious import in schools and barracks, where discipline is to be maintained. I stayed out of bounds late at night ... I cut classes continually. I visited Fairfield ... and a factory town further south, where I lounged about the streets all day, talking with people.

Professor Stanton, not to my surprise, sent for me again.

Yet I was amazed at what he knew about me, amazed, too, to discover the extent of the school's complicated system of pious espionage that checked up the least move of every student.

Stanton brought out a sheet of paper with dates and facts of my misbehaviour that could not be controverted....

"So we will have to ask you to withdraw from the school, unless you right-about-face ... otherwise, we have had enough of you ... in fact, if it had not been for your great promise--your talents!--"

I waved the compliment aside rather wearily.

"I think that if this school has had enough of me, I have had about enough of the school."

I expressed, in plain terms, my opinion of their espionage system.

"Your omnipotent God must be hard put to it when He has to rely on the help of such sneakiness to keep His Book (and I couldn't help laughing at the literary turn I gave to my denunciation) before the public!"

Stanton's eyes flamed behind their glasses.

"Gregory, I shall have to ask you to leave the Hill as soon as you can get your things together," he shouted.

"--which can hardly be soon enough for me," I replied.

"Come, my boy," continued Stanton, as if ashamed at himself for his outburst, and putting his hand on my shoulder, "you're a good sort of boy, after all ... you have so much in you, so much energy and power ... why don't you put it to right uses?... after your father has made such sacrifices for you, I hate to see you run off to a ravelled edge like this.

"Even yet, if you'll only promise to behave and preserve a proper dignity in the presence of the other students--even yet we would be glad to have you stay and graduate ... and we might be able to procure you a scholarship at Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Brown. Lang says you put yourself into the spirit of Homer like an old Greek, always doing more work than the requirements,--and Dunn says, that you show him things in Vergil that he never saw before."

Moved, I shook my head sadly. I hated myself for liking these people.

"If you mean that I should be like other people ... I just can't ... it's neither pose nor affectation." (He had intimated that some of the professors alleged that as the core of the trouble.) "I guess I don't belong here ... yes, it would be better for me to go away!"

* * * * *

That night, unobserved, I stole into the chapel that stood on the Crest of the hill, against the infinite stars.

I spent nearly all the night in the chapel, alone. The place was full of things. I felt there all the gods that ever were worshipped ... and all the great spirits of mankind. And I perceived fully how silly, weak, grotesque, and vain I was; and yet, how big and wonderful, it would be to swim counter, as I meant, to the huge, swollen, successful currents of the commercial, bourgeois practicality of present-day America.

* * * * *

I pinned up a sign on the bulletin board in the hall, in rhyme, announcing, that, that afternoon, at four o'clock, John Gregory would hold an auction of his books of poetry.

* * * * *

My room was crowded with amused students. I mounted the table, like an auctioneer, while they sat on my cot and on the floor, and crowded the door.

At first the boys jeered and pushed. But when I started selling my copy of Byron and telling about his life, they fell into a quiet, and listened. After I had made that talk, they clapped me. Byron went for a dollar, fetching the largest price. I sold my Shelley, my Blake, my Herrick, my Marvell, my Milton ... all....

My Keats I could not bring myself to sell. I kept that like a treasure. What I could not sell I gave away.

My entire capital was ten dollars ... one suit of clothes ... a change of underwear ... two shirts. I discarded my trunk and crammed what little I owned into my battered suitcase.

That night, the story of my dismissal from school having travelled about from mouth to mouth, and the tale of my poets' auction--the boys cheered me, as I came into the dining hall--cheered me partly affectionately, partly derisively.

* * * * *

In the morning mail I received a letter from the New York _Independent_, a weekly literary magazine. Dr. Ward, the editor, informed me that I possessed genuine poetic promise, and he was taking two of the poems I had recently submitted to him, for publication in his magazine.

* * * * *

Like the vagrant I was, I considered myself indefinitely fixed, with that ten dollars. I went to Boston ... hung about the library and the waterfront ... stayed in cheap lodging houses for a few days--and found myself on the tramp again.

* * * * *

I freighted it to New York, where I landed, grimy and full of coal-dust. And I sought out my uncle who lived in the Bronx.

I appeared, opportunely, around supper time. I asked him if he was not glad to see me. He grimaced a yes, but wished that I would stop tramping about and fit in, in life, somewhere.... He observed that my shirt was filthy and that I must take a bath immediately and put on a clean one of his.

In Boston I had ditched everything but the clothes I wore ... and my suit was wrecked with hard usage.

"Get work at anything," advised my Uncle Jim, "and save up till you can rig yourself out new. You'll never accomplish anything looking the way you do. Your editor at the _Independent_ will not be impressed and think it romantic, if you go to see him the way you are ... ragged poets are out of date."

* * * * *

At "Perfection City" I had made the acquaintance of a boy, whom, curiously enough, I have left out of that part of the narrative that has to deal with the Nature Colony. He was a millionaire's son: his father, a friend of Barton's, had sent him out to "Perfection City" with a tutor. His name was Milton Saunders. He was a fine, generous lad, but open as the weather to every influence ... especially to any which was not for his good.

One morning I saw him actually remove his own shoes and give them to a passing tramp who needed them worse than he.

"That's nothing, dad's money will be sufficient to buy me a new pair," he explained, going back to his tent, in his bare feet, his socks in his hand--to put on his sneakers while he hastened to the shoe store in Andersonville.

* * * * *

Milton had urged me to be sure to come and see him if I chanced to be in New York.

I now called him on the telephone and was cordially invited to visit him, and that, immediately.

The servants eyed me suspiciously and sent me up by the tradesmen's elevator. Milton flew into a fury over it. His friend was his friend, no matter how he was dressed--he wanted them to remember that, in the future!

He brought out a bottle of wine, had a fine luncheon set before me. I went for the food, but pushed the wine aside. He drank the bottle himself. I was still, for my part, clinging to shreds of what I had learned at "Perfection City." ...

He rushed me to his tailor. I had told him of my first poems' being accepted.

"Of course, you must be better dressed when you go to see the editor."

The tailor looked me over, in whimsical astonishment. He vowed that he could not have a suit ready for me by ten the next morning, as Milton was ordering.

"Then you have a suit here for me about ready."

"It is ready now."

"Alter it immediately to fit Mr. Gregory ... we're about the same height."

The tailor said _that_ could be done.

For the rest of the day Milton and I peregrinated from one saloon back-room to another ... in each of which the boy seemed to be well known. He drank liquor while I imbibed soft drinks ... the result was better for him than for me. I soon had the stomach-ache, while he only seemed a little over-exhilarated.

At his door-step he shoved a ten dollar bill into my hand. I demurred, but accepted it.

"I'd hand you more," he apologised, "but the Old Man never lets me have any more than just so much at a time ... says I waste it anyhow ... but I manage to do a lot of charging," he chuckled.

"Have you a place to stay to-night?"

"Yes ... I have an uncle who lives uptown."

* * * * *

When I showed up at my uncle's, that night, I showed him my new rig-out, and explained to him how I came into possession of it. But he did not accept my explanation. Instead, he shook his head in mournful dubiousness ... indicating that he doubted my story, and insinuating that I had not come by my suit honestly; as well as by the new dress suitcase Saunders had presented me with, and the shirts and underclothing.

"God knows where you'll end up, Johnny."

After supper Uncle Jim grew restive again, and he came out frankly with the declaration that he did not want me to stay overnight in the house, but to pack on out to Haberford to my father ... or, since I must stay in town to see my editor (again that faint, dubious smile), I might stay the night at a Mills Hotel ... since my rich friend had given me money, too ... besides my aunt was not so very strong and I put a strain on her.

* * * * *

At the Mills Hotel I was perched in a cell-like corner room, high up. The room smelt antiseptic. Nearby, Broadway roared and spread in wavering blazons of theatric gold. I looked down upon it, dreaming of my future fame, my great poetic and literary career ... my plays that would some day be announced down there, in great shining sign-letters.

* * * * *

The sound of an employée's beating with a heavy stick, from door to iron door, to wake up all the Mills Hotel patrons, bestirred me at an early hour.

* * * * *

I meditated my next move, and now resolved on another try at community life.... The Eos Artwork Studios, founded in the little New York State town of Eos, by the celebrated eccentric author and lecturer, Roderick Spalton.

I was in such impatience to reach Eos that I did not cross over to Haberford, to drop in on my father. I feared also that my leaving school the second time, "under a cloud," would not win me an enthusiastic welcome from him.

* * * * *

By nightfall I was well on my way to Eos, sitting in an empty box-car. I had with me my new clothes--which I wore--and my suitcase, a foolish way to tramp. But I thought I might as well appear before Roderick Spalton with a little more "presence" than usual. For I intended spending some time in his community.

Characteristically, I had gone to the office of the _Independent_, had not found the editor in, that morning, and had chafed at the idea of waiting till the afternoon, when I might have had a fruitful talk with a man who was interested in the one real thing in my life--my poetry.

* * * * *

I reached Rochester safely. It was on the stretch to Buffalo that I paid dearly for being well-dressed and carrying a suitcase ... as I lay asleep on the floor of the box-car I was set upon by three tramps, who pinioned my arms and legs before I was even fully awake. I was forced to strip off my clothes, after wrestling and fighting as hard as I could. I floated off into the stars from a blow on the head....

When I came to, I was trembling violently both with cold and from the nervous shock. My assailants had made off with my suitcase ... I was in nothing but my B.V.D.'s and shirt. Even my Keats had been stolen. But beside me I found the ragged, cast-off suit of one of the tramps ... and my razor, which had dropped out of my coat pocket, while the tramp had changed clothes, and not been noticed. Gingerly, I put on the ragged suit....

* * * * *

I stood in front of the Eos Artwork Studios.

I saw a boy coming down the path from one of the buildings.

"Would you tell me please where I can find the Master?" I asked, reverently.

The boy gave me a long stare.

"Oh, you mean Mr. Spalton?"

"Yes."

"That's him ... there ... choppin' wood."

There was a young man and an older one, both chopping wood, in the back of a building, but in fairly open view.

I walked to where they worked with both inward and outward trepidation, for, to me, Spalton was one of the world's great men.

Just as I reached the spot, the younger of the two threw down his axe.

"So long, Dad! now I'll go into the shop and tend to those letters."

I stood in the presence of the great Roderick Spalton himself, the man who, in his _Brief Visits to the Homes of Famous Folk_, had written more meatily and wisely than any American author since Emerson ... the man whose magazine called _The Dawn_, had rendered him an object of almost religious veneration and worship to thousands of Americans whose spirits reached for something more than the mere piling of dollars one on the other....

I stood before him, visibly overwhelmed. It was evident that my silent hero-worship was sweet to him. He bespoke me gently and courteously.

"So you want to become an Eoite?"

"Yes," I whispered, bending my gaze humbly before his.

"And what is your name, my dear boy."

"John Gregory, Master!"

"What have you brought with you? where is your baggage?"

"I--I lost my baggage ... all I have with me is a-a r-razor."

He leaned his head back and laughed joyously. His lambent brown eyes glowed with humour. I liked the man.

"Yes, we'll give you a job--Razorre!" he assured me, calling me by the nickname which clung to me during my stay....

"Take that axe and show me what you can do."

I caught up the axe and fell to with enthusiasm. The gospel of the dignity and worth of labour that he preached thrilled in me. It was the first time I ever enjoyed working....

As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me for years--as if I, too, were Somebody.