Chapter 19

"Johnnie is away ... far off ... on the sea ... in a ship."

And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled him, and he wished to dismiss it. Then, in a moment, he whirled about, changed and furious. He rose to a sitting posture ... swung his legs out, bringing the bed-clothes a-wry with him....

"You are an impostor ... you are not my son ... I tell you again, he is away ... has been away for years ... as long as I can remember ... perhaps he is dead ... you are an impostor."

He leaped up, full of madness, and seized hold of me.

"Stop, Father, what are you trying to do?"

As I grappled with him, trying to keep him from hurting me--and he was quite strong, for all his emaciation--the horror of my situation made me sick at the stomach, quite sick ... and my mind went ridiculously back to the times when my father and I had eaten oyster-fries together ... "that is the only thing you and this man have in common ... oyster-fries," remarked my mind to me. All the while I was pinning his wrists in my grasp ... re-pinning them as he frantically wrested them loose ... swearing and heaping obscenities on my head ... all the while, I thought of those oyster-fries ... we had saved up a lard-tin full of bacon grease to fry them in ... and fry after fry had been sizzled to a rich, cracker-powdered brown in that grease ... a peculiar smell waxed in the kitchen, however ... which we could never trace to its source ... "a dead rat somewhere, maybe," suggested my father.

When we had used a third of the bacon grease, the dead rat's foot stood up ... out of that can.

We discharged the contents of our stomachs in the sink.

This was the ridiculous incident that possessed my imagination while I struggled with my father.

* * * * *

I had my father over on the bed. He fought to a sitting posture again ... got his finger in my eye and made me see a whorl of dancing sparks. With irritation and a curse ... then both laughing hysterically and sobbing ... I bore him back to his pillow....

The strength had gone entirely out of him ... now it came into his mind that I was there trying to rob or kill him.

"Spare me, spare me!" he pleaded, "you can have everything in the house ... only don't kill me! My God!"

"Good Christ!" I groaned, as he beat upward, fighting again.

I let him rise, almost palsied with horror.

He perched on the edge of the bed, exhausted,--began groping with one hand, in the air, idly.

"What is it? What do you want?"

"Give me my pants! I don't trust you. I want to go to the corner and get a drink ... give me my pants!"

"Pop, look at me ... stop this nonsense ... you're safe ... I'm your son, Johnnie!"

"That's all very well," he assented with an air of reserved cunning.

"Please believe me," I pleaded.

"All right ... you are my son ... only don't kill me," he responded craftily.

"Father!... good God!"

He perceived by the emotion of my last exclamation, that at least I was not ill-disposed toward him.

He clutched at the advantage.

"Promise to take care of me till Johnnie comes--he's just around the corner," slyly.

"Pop, what is it you want? What can I do for you?"

"A curious greed flickered in his eyes.

"Get me a drink!"

"All right! I'll get it for you!"

"Let me think! There's none in the house ... none left, Emily said."

"But I brought some with me ... wait a minute." I went into the kitchen, turned on the tap softly, filled a glass half full of water, brought it back to him.

"Here it is."

"I don't like the colour of it."

"Why, it has a nice, rich colour."

"What is it?--Scotch?"

"Yes."

He sipped of it. Made a rueful face. "I don't like the taste of it ... it tastes too much like water," he commented, with a quiet, grave, matter-of-fact grimace that set me laughing, in spite of myself....

"Drink it down! I swear it's all right."

He tossed off the water.

"Give me my pants. I want to get out of here."

"Why, wasn't that whiskey that I just gave you?"

"Yes, yes ... but not very good stuff. I know where I can get better."

Humouring him, I helped him into his trousers ... painfully he put on his shirt, neatly tied his tie, while I steadied him. This manual function seemed to better his condition straightway. He startled me by turning to me with a look of amused recognition in his eyes. He was no longer off his head, just a very sick man.

"Well, Johnnie, so you're back again?"

"Yes, Pop--back again!"

"What are you going to do next?" he queried wearily, seating himself laboriously in an armchair.

"Stay, and take care of you!"

"That will be unnecessary. I have had a rather severe attack of malaria ... that is all ... left me rather weak ... but now I'm getting over it ... had to take a lot of whiskey and quinine, though, to break it up!

"Malaria comes on me, every spring, you know ... harder than usual, this spring, though ... it's made me dotty ... made me say things, at times, I'm afraid!"

We sat silent.

"--need any money?" he was reaching into his pocket.

"No, I don't want a cent!"

"Then take this five dollar bill and go around to the corner saloon and buy me a pint ... what I had is all used up, and the chills are not quite out of me yet."

* * * * *

On the way to the saloon I stopped at Hartman's express office ... related the foregoing story....

"H'm! yes!... I see!" ... Hartman braced his thumbs together meditatively, "--from what you say it's pretty serious ... something will have to be done this very day....

"Yes, go and get the pint ... let him have a drink of it. And--and keep close to him all the time ... don't," he added significantly, "leave the lady in question in the room alone with him for a single moment."

* * * * *

"Have you got the pint, Son?"

"Yes, Father. Here it is ... but just a little!"

"I know what I'm doing!"

He took most of it down at a gulp.

Noticing the anxious look in my eyes.

"Don't worry about me, Johnnie. I can take it or leave it alone ... --always could!"

* * * * *

Before Mrs. Jenkins could come back, Hartman anticipated her with a nurse and a doctor. As Mrs. Jenkins came in, chagrin and indignation showed on her face. But she bowed perforce to the situation. She was too wise not to.

"His lodge-brothers are taking care of Mr. Gregory now, Mrs. Jenkins," explained Mr. Hartman suavely, warning her off, at the same time, with a severe, understanding look in his eyes.

She dropped her eyelashes--though with a bit of instinctive coquetry in them--under his straight-thrusting glance.

"Well, I suppose professional care _would_ be better than anything I could do for him ... but," sweetly, "I'll drop in from time to time to see if there's any little thing I can do."

* * * * *

Deprived of the loving care of Emily Jenkins, though he called for her many times, my father mended his condition rapidly. And, after a long, mysterious conference with Hartman and other members of his fraternal order, he consented to allow himself to be sent West on a visit. But not till they had promised to keep his job as foreman in the Composite Works, open for him, till he was well enough to come back.

After I had seen my father off, I stayed in the silent rooms only long enough to pack up my books, which I left in care of Hartman.

I had at last arrived at a definite plan of action.

My grandfather was transacting some sort of business in Washington, as my uncle, Jim, had informed me. There he was living in affluence, married again, in his old age ... just like his former wife.

I had evolved a scheme which seemed to me both clever and feasible, by which to extract from him a few hundred or a thousand dollars with which to prosecute my studies further, and enter, eventually, say, Princeton or Harvard ... perhaps Oxford.

* * * * *

I found my grandfather holding forth in a swell suite of offices in the business district of Washington.

Near his great desk, with a little table and typewriter, sat a girl, very pretty--he would see to that!... evidently his stenographer and private secretary.

As I stood by the railing, she observed me coldly once or twice, looking me over, before she thrust her pencil in her abundant hair and sauntered haughtily over to see what I was after.

Despite the fact that I informed her who I was, with eyes impersonal as the dawn she replied that she would see if Mr. Gregory could see me ... that at present he was busy with a conference in the adjoining room.

I sat and waited ... dusty and derelict, in the spick-and-span office, where hung the old-fashioned steel engravings on the wall, of Civil War battles, of generals and officers seated about tables on camp stools,--bushy-bearded and baggy-trousered.

Finally my grandfather Gregory walked briskly forth. He looked about, first, as if to find me. His eyes, after hovering hawklike, settled, in a grey, level, impersonal glance, on me.

"Come in here," he bade, not even calling me by name.

I stepped inside, trying hard to be bold. But his precision and appearance of keen prosperity and sufficiency made me act, in spite of myself, deprecative. So I sat there by him, in his private room, keying my voice shrill and voluble and high, as I always do, when I am not sure of my case. And, worse, he let me do the talking ... watching me keenly, the while.

I put to him my proposition of having my life insured in his name, that I might borrow a thousand or so of him, on the policy, to go to college with....

"Ah, if he only lets me have what I ask," I was dreaming, as I pleaded, "I'll go to England ... to some college with cool, grey mediaeval buildings ... and there spend a long time in the quiet study of poetry ... thinking of nothing, caring for nothing else."

"No! how absurd!" he was snapping decisively. I came to from my vision.

"My dear Johnnie, your proposition is both absurd and--" as if that were the last enormity--"very unbusinesslike!"

"But I will then become a great poet! On my word of honour, I will! and I will be a great honour to the Gregory family!"

He shook his head. He rose, standing erect and slender, like a small flagpole. As I rose I towered high over the little-bodied, trim man.

"Come, you haven't eaten yet?"

"No!"

Well, he had a sort of a heart, after all ... some family feeling.

Walking slightly ahead, so as not to seem to be in my company, old Grandfather Gregory took me to a--lunch counter ... bowing to numerous friends and acquaintances on the way ... once he stepped aside to a hurried conference, leaving me standing forlorn and solitary, like a scarecrow in a field.

I grew so angry at him I could hardly bridle my anger in.

"--like oyster sandwiches?" he asked.

* * * * *

He didn't even wait to let me choose my own food.

"Two oyster sandwiches and--a cup of coffee," he barked.

While I ate he stepped outside and talked with another friend.

* * * * *

"Good-bye," he was bidding me, extending a tiny hand, the back of it covered with steel-coloured hairs, "you'd better go back up to Jersey--just heard your daddy is very sick there ... he might need your help."

I thought cautiously. Evidently he knew nothing of my father's having been sent home by his lodge. I affected to be perturbed....

"In that case--could you--advance me my fare to Haberford?"

I'd wangle a _few_ dollars out of him.

My grandfather's answer was a silent, granite smile.

"--just want to see what you can cajole out of the old man, eh? No, Johnnie--I'll leave you to make your way back in the same way you've made your way to Washington ... from all accounts railroad fare is the least of your troubles."

My whole hatred of him, so carefully concealed while I thought there was some hopes of putting through my educational scheme, now broke out--

"_You"_--I began, cursing....

"I knew that's the way you felt all along ... better run along now, or I'll say I don't know you, and have you taken up for soliciting alms."

* * * * *

Before nightfall I was well on my way to Philadelphia. For a while I resigned myself to the life of a tramp. I hooked up with another gang of hoboes, in the outskirts of that city, and taught them the plan of the ex-cook that we'd crowned king down in Texas....

I kept myself in reading matter by filching the complete works of Sterne (in one volume) and the poetry of Milton--from an outside stand of a second hand book store....

* * * * *

--left that gang, and started forth alone again. I became a walking bum, if a few miles a day constitutes taking that appellation. I walked ahead a few miles, then sat down and studied my Milton, or dug deep into _Tristram Shandy_. Hungry, I went up to farmhouse or backdoor of city dwelling, and asked for food....

* * * * *

I found myself in the outskirts of Newark again.

I took my Sterne and Milton to Breasted's, hoping to trade them for other books. I stood before the outside books, on the stand, hesitating. I was, for the moment, ashamed to show myself to "the perfesser," because of the raggedness that I had fallen into.

While I was hesitating, a voice at my elbow--

"Any books I can show you?--any special book you're looking for?"

The voice was the voice of the tradesman, warning off the man unlikely to buy--but it was the familiar voice of my friend, "the perfesser," just the same. I turned and smiled into his face, happy in greeting him, losing the trepidation my rags gave me.

"Why, Johnnie Gregory!" he shook my hand warmly as if I were a prince. I was enchanted.

"I want to exchange two books if I can--for others!"

"Come right into the back. Breasted, the boss, is out for the day.... I'm having my lunch sent in, won't you have some with me?"

He acted just as if he hadn't noticed my dilapidation.

I said I'd gladly share his lunch.

He drew my story out of me,--the story of my life, in fact, before the afternoon wore to dusk.

* * * * *

"Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked him.

"No ... far from it ... " adding gently, with a smile, "sometimes an awful fool, though, Johnnie--if I may say it."

* * * * *

"Won't you stay overnight?"

"No, thanks just the same, 'Perfesser.'"

"I have room enough ... better hang around a few days and look for a job here."

"It's too near Haberford."

"But I know you'd take a couple of fresh books, if I gave them to you, now wouldn't you?"

My eyes lit up as with hunger.

"This Milton and Sterne are too used-up to be worth a nickel a-piece. Maybe, if I'd keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when you're famous," he joked.

"If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and this Ossian? I want the Keats for myself. It will renew my courage. And--the Ossian--will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old Pfeiler?"

I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both.

Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he grew to hate me.

Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly of me.

* * * * *

I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not caring to write a line myself.

* * * * *

I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston, and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

I asked who was Dorothy....

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

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

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