Chapter 21

I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he represented the Kansas City _Star_. As he spoke his keen grey eyes looked me over impartially, but with intelligent, friendly interest. Though he was dressed in the student's conventional style, even to the curiously nicked and clipped soft hat then predominant, there was still about him an off-handedness, an impudent at-homeness that bespoke a wider knowledge, or assumed knowledge, of the world, than the average student possesses.

The interview appeared the next afternoon.

"VAGABOND POET ARRIVES.

LAUREL ENROLLS BOX-CAR STUDENT."

It made me a nine days' wonder with the students. I caught the men staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from class room to class room....

But the reek of the stable. It went with me like a ghost everywhere. Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ... I saw that it was noticeable to others, and I sat 'way back, in a seat apart, by myself.

* * * * *

Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.

One afternoon as I was passing his house he beckoned me in.

"You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on you as my protégé ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in _Wilhelm Tell_, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too.... And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class for you to translate and construe."

Langworth had only half the truth from King.

Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it without hesitation.

* * * * *

About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of the New York _Independent_. He informed me that he had taken a poem of mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.

Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the _Independent_.

* * * * *

I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with me wherever I went.

Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.

* * * * *

The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.

They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ... and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the dam....

At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to teach.

Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of low-lying country. This place was known as the "Bottoms."

I am trying to give you the flavour of the town.

They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power ... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a concomitant prostitution of coloured women and girls throve. One or two students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they were fond....

The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus frumenti--for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble," which seemed to be prevalent and epidemic throughout the community.

* * * * *

Saturday was market day for the farmers who lived in the adjoining countryside ... and the livery stables where they put up their horses were also resorts for gambling and the selling of "bootleg" booze....

These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.

There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their trade ... "a square meal for a quarter" ... and a square meal they served ... multitudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee. Where these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little bootlegging on the side.

It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job. The same one where I had spent my first night in town.

* * * * *

Langworth sent for me one day.

"I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I considered I ought to see you about it."

I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored professors and students.

My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to me the proverb of "birds of a feather."

* * * * *

Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been barren of fruit.

"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs, querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.

"Laddie has just died."

"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.

"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was." There was an acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she wanted her husband to send me away.

"She wants you to go," whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a sick child. He escorted me into the storm porch. "You have no idea," he apologised defensively, "how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you can become...."

"What's this?" I asked, taken aback. He had thrust a check into my hand as he shook hands good-bye.

"It's a check I've just endorsed over to you. Royalties on a recent text-book. Please do take it." I had intimated that I would probably be compelled to quit college and go on the tramp again ... confessing frankly, also, that a stationary life got on my nerves at times.

"I want you to keep on, not go back to the tramp life ... we'll make something of you yet," he jested, diffidently, steering me off when he noticed that I was about to heap profuse thanks on him.

"How can I ever thank you--"

"By studying hard and making good. By becoming the great poet I wanted to be."

"But how can I pay this back? It will take a long time--"

"When you arrive at the place where you can afford to pay me back, pass it on to someone else who is struggling as you are now, and as I myself have struggled."

* * * * *

Always, always I wrote my poetry and kept studying in my own fashion ... marks of proficiency, attendance at class went by the board. My studying was rather browsing among the multitudes of books in the college library. I passed hours, back in the stacks, forgetting day and night ... recitations ... meals....

I was soon in trouble with my professors ... I was always up, and even ahead, with my studies, but I was a disrupting influence for the other students, because of my irregularity.

I discovered wonderful books back there in the "stack" ... the works of Paracelsus, who whispered me that wisdom was to be found more in the vagabond bye-ways of life than in the ordered and regulated highways. That the true knowledge was to be garnered from knocking about with vagrants, gipsies, carriers ... from corners in wayside inns where travellers discoursed....

And there was Boehmen, the inspired German shoemaker, who was visited by an angel, or some sort of divine stranger, and given his first illumination outside his shop ... and later walked a-field and heard what the flowers were saying to each other, seeing through all creation at one glance, crystal-clear.

And there were the unusual poets ... old Matthew Prior, who wrote besides his poems, the Treaty, was it, of Utrecht?... hobnobbed with the big people of the land ... yet refused all marks of honour ... the best Latinist of the day ... at a time when Latin was the diplomatic language of Europe.

When he wasn't hobnobbing with the aristocracy or writing treaties he was sitting in inns and drinking with teamsters ... had a long love affair with a cobbler's wife, and married the lady after the cobbler died....

There was Skelton and his rough-running, irregular rhythmic rather than strictly metrical verses ... mad and ribald ... often tedious ... but with wild flashes of beauty interwoven through his poems ... the poem about his mistress's sparrow ... the elegy on its death ... where he prayed God to give it the little wren of the Virgin Mary, as a wife, in heaven--"to tread, for _solas_!"

And Gay, the author of many delightful fables ... who must wait still longer for his proper niche, because he showed gross levity on the subject of death and life ... he who wrote for his own epitaph:

"Life is a jest, and all things show it; I thought so once, but now I know it."

For all those who would not keep step, who romped out of the regular procedure and wantoned by the way, picking what flowers they chose, I held feeling and sympathy.

* * * * *

The _Annual_, a book published by the seniors each spring, now advertised a prize for the best poem submitted by any student ... a prize of twenty-five dollars. I had no doubt but that the prize was mine already. Not that I had become as yet the poet I desired, but that the average level of human endeavour in any art is so low that I knew my assiduity and application and fair amount of inspiration would win.

I wrote my poem--_A Day in a Japanese Garden_, ... only two lines I remember:

"And black cranes trailed their long legs as they flew Down to it, somewhere out of Heaven's blue,"

descriptive of a little lake ... oh, yes, and two more I remember, descriptive of sunset:

"And Fujiyama's far and sacred top Became a jewel shining in the sun."

The poem was an over-laquered, metaphor-cloyed thing ... much like the bulk of our free verse of to-day ... but it was superior to all the rest of the contributions.

The prize was declared off. After an evening's serious discussion the committee decided that, though my effort was far and away the best, it would not do to let me have the prize, because I was so wild-appearing ... because I was known as having been a tramp. And because seniors and students of correct standing at the university had tried. And it would not be good for the school morale to let me have what I had won.

They compromised by declaring the prize off.

A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award.

I thought of the couplet of Gay:

"He who would without malice pass his days Must live obscure and never merit praise."

* * * * *

Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.

When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....

Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education, not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to dead and commonplace formulae.

On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and creased ... which,--now dead,--it was pretended their spirits took up and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....

* * * * *

And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the fly in the ointment....

I thought of my Southern widow, Mrs. Tighe.

"Poet," she had once said, "come to my place in the South. I have a bungalow back of my house that you may live in ... write your poems unmolested ... I won't be going there for awhile yet, but I will give you a letter to the caretaker, and you can use the place. And my pantry and ice box will be at your service ... so you'll need do nothing but write."

Now, fed full of rebuffs, I wished I had accepted her offer. And I wrote her, care of the Eos Artworks ... an ingenuous letter, burning with naïve love....

She had once told me how she had scandalised the neighbours by painting a little boy, in the nude, in that same bungalow ... the story being carried about by the servants ... and if it had not been for her social prestige!--

I thought there could be nothing pleasanter than living in her place, perhaps becoming her lover....

I imagined myself posing, nude, for her canvases....

But my brief hope fell to earth. A curt note from a married sister of hers ... who first apologised for having read my letter.... But Mrs. Tighe was abroad, painting in Spain.

The shock of having someone else, indubitably with a hostile eye, read my letter, in which I had poured forth all my heart, made me almost sick. I was chagrined inexpressibly.

* * * * *

The truth was, spring was coming on. Spring affects me as it does migratory fowls. With its first effort of meadow and bough toward renewed flowers and greenness, the instinct for change and adventure stirs anew in me.

The school year was not yet up, but I didn't want to graduate.

* * * * *

At that time I had a passion for meeting well-known people.

It was then my only avenue of literary publication, so to speak. The magazines were steadily returning my deluge of poems--I sent at least three a week to them ... but to those who had established themselves I could show my work, and get their advice and notice....

* * * * *

Walking along the main street, I ran into Jack Travers, the young reporter who had dubbed me the "Vagabond Poet," the "Box-car Bard."...

"Well, what are you up to now, Gregory?"

"Nothing, only I'm thinking of a trip south to Osageville to pay a visit to Mackworth, the Kansas novelist."

"That's the stuff ... I need another good story for the _Era_."

"I'm going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot."

"Great! 'Vagabond Poet' Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan. It's only ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ... but you'll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can get the story in in time for this Sunday's _Era_...."

Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.

"Come on, we'll walk up an alley and I'll snap you just as if you were on the way...."

"No, I won't do that!"

--"won't do what?"

--"won't fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will have to be on the way!"

"Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo you'll have to plough through?" he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud, grumbling, to the edge of town.

There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in my hand.

Travers waved me good-bye. "You'll see the story in the _Era_ Sunday sure," he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.

* * * * *

It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.

My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the impractical,--the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks and small business men bred in my people for generations!...

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

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

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

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

It darkened rapidly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

"Does Mr. Jarvis Mackworth live here?"

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

"Yes, I am the poet."

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

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

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

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