Chapter 22

"My boy ... come in ... my God, you're all wet ... you look frail, too." A pity shone in his eyes. "Minnie, call up Ally Merton ..." turning to me, "I have, as you can see, no clothes to fit you ... but Ally might have ... he's about your size, but he carries a trifle more meat on his bones....

"Come in and dry yourself before the fire till he gets over."

We sat before the gas-fire of artificial logs.

"Minnie, will you make a cup of tea for this--poor boy," and he lowered his voice at the last two words, realising that I was hearing, too.

"Yes, Jarv!"

* * * * *

I sat at the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in accompaniment with the records ... it was Caruso now....

"A glorious voice, isn't it, young man?" Mackworth asked, as I ate voraciously of the cold roast set before me ... of the delicious white bread and fresh dairy butter, just from the churn of some neighbouring farmer.

"I know nothing much about music," he continued, "--just appreciate it ... --seems to me that's what we need now, more than anything else ... appreciation of the arts.... I like to sit here and pick out the melodies on the piano as the tune runs on. It inspires me. The precious people, the aesthetic upstarts, make fun of Edison and his 'canned music,' as they call it ... but I say Edison is one of the great forces for culture in America to-day. Everybody can't go to New York, London, Paris, Bayreuth ... not to Chicago even....

"Beauty must come to Osageville, since Osageville cannot come to Beauty."

I was charmed.

"Mr. Mackworth, you are a great man," I said.

* * * * *

A ring at the bell. Ally Merton....

"Ally, this is Mr. John Gregory, poet at large, Villon of American Literature ... let us hope, some day a little more of the Whittier ... Ally--" and the speaker turned to me, "Ally Merton is my right hand man ... my best reporter...."

He took Merton aside, in private talk.... Ally looked me over with a keen, swift glance that appraised me from head to foot instantly ... sharply but not hostilely ... as one who takes in a situation in a comprehensive instant.

"Yes, Mr. Mackworth, I can do it easily ... if they'll fit him."

There was an impersonality, however, about Merton's cryptic words that annoyed me.

"You are going home with Ally, John," Mackworth said to me, using my familiar name for the first time, "and borrow a suit of his clothes ... and you are coming back with him to dinner ... where you'll meet a very famous person--Miss Clara Martin."

* * * * *

Ally's blue serge suit was too short in the legs and arms for me ... otherwise it fitted. His gentleness and unobtrusive quietness entered into me, along with the putting on of his apparel. He led me upstairs in his house.

"Mr. Mackworth has asked me to put you up while you are in town ... because his own house is full at present, otherwise he would accommodate you there ... I guess we can make shift to entertain you properly.

"Here is the bathroom ... if you don't mind my saying it, when you throw the toilet seat up, let the water run from the tap over the wash basin ... my mother and sisters!" he trailed off in inaudible, deprecative urge of the proprieties.

Ally was anything but a small-town product. Suave, socially adroit, an instinctive creature of Good Form....

He came into the room he had given me to stay in. I looked like a different man, togged out in his clothes. Ally was surprised that I could wear his shoes ... he had such small feet ... I informed him proudly that I, too, had small feet....

"No, no, that is not the way to tie a tie ... let me show you ... you must make both ends meet exactly ... there, that's it!" and he stepped back, a look of satisfaction on his face ... he handed me a pearl stick pin.

"This is a loan, not a gift," he murmured.

I returned a quick, angry look.

"I don't want your pin."

"No offence meant," he deprecated, "and you must wear it" (for I was putting it aside) "Mr. Mackworth and I both want you to look your best when you meet Miss Martin at dinner to-night".... I angrily almost decided to take his pin with me when I left, just to fulfill his pre-supposition.

"No, that's not the place to stick it ... let me show you ... not in the body of the tie, but further down," and he deftly placed the pin in the right spot. Then he stepped back like an artist who is proud of having made a good job of bad materials....

"You look almost like a gentleman."

I was about to lick into Merton and lend him a sample of a few strong objurgations of road and jail, when I saw myself in the glass. I stood transfixed. He had not meant to be ironic. The transformation was startling....

"If you would only keep yourself tidy all the time that way!... it's easy."

"Not for me ... everything material that I touch seems to fall apart.... I lose my shirts inexplicably ... my socks ... holes appear overnight in my clothes. Books are the only things I can keep. I am always cluttered up with them."

"Appearances mean everything ... then, if you have the rest, the goods to deliver, there is no place a man might not go nor attain."

I looked the small town reporter over in surprise. I studied him closely for the first time. He belonged to the world, not to Osageville ... the world of fashion, of smartness ... a world I despised. My world and his would always be like separate planets. He would consort with people for the mere pleasure of social life with them. The one thing I did not like about him was his small mouth ... but then I did not like my own mouth ... it was large, sensual, loose and cruel.

And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing. But then my walk was a loose, bent-kneed method of progression....

* * * * *

Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains of industry, was dark and tall. She had been good-looking in girlhood. She had fine eyes in a devastated face.

I found myself petted, mothered by her. As soon as she saw me she removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.

At supper I was told of a new project. A group of writers, especially of writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be called the _National Magazine_; for it was to be no less than that, a magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more impossible ideals of small business units--the ideal of a bourgeois commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.

I was assured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing American ideals and dreams was needed by them.... Ray Stannard Baker, Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....

I saw clearly that their revolution was a backward-working one. That the country's business could never again be broken up into a multitude of small shops and individual competitors.

Of course, I was at that time a Socialist of the violent, fiery type--with a strong cast toward the anarchism of Emma Goldman.

But it flattered me to be taken, as it were, into the inner councils of such great folk....

"Send us some of your poetry, with the right American ring to it, Johnnie," suggested Miss Martin, "and we will make you the poet of the group."

I think that Ally Merton's clothes on me, and his correct tie, made my good impression, as much as my after-talk around the fireplace, where I spun yarns of my strange life and adventures.

* * * * *

"You made a hit," commented Ally, as he conducted me back to his house, "it's a great opening for you. Follow it up!"

"I will!"

* * * * *

That night I could not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body. Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses, each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of simplicity in it, and the dignity of honest labour.

Yes, I would be their poet. And America's poet....

And visions of a comfortable, bourgeois success took me ... interminable Chautauquas, with rows of women listening to my inspiring verses ... visits as honoured guest to the homes of great popular leaders like Roosevelt ... dignity and rides in parlour cars, instead of dusty, dirty box cars ... interviews of weight and speeches of consequence ... and the newspapers would drop their undercurrent of levity when I was written about in them, and treat me with consideration.

Finally, I would possess a home like Mackworth's, set back amid shade trees, a house not too large, not too small ... a cook and maid ... a pretty, unobtrusive wife devoted to me....

And I would wear white linen collars every day, tie the ends of my tie even ... and each year would see a new book of mine out, published by some bookseller of repute ... and I could afford Red Seal records ... and have my largest room for a library....

Middle-class comfort was upon me ... good plumbing ... electric light ... laundry sent out ... no more washing of my one shirt overnight and hanging it up to dry on the back of a chair, while I slept ... and putting it on, next morning, crinkly and still damp.

I was already seduced, if there hadn't been that something in me which I myself could not control!

* * * * *

It was when I caught Mackworth on the streets of his town and in his newspaper office that I discovered the man himself.

In our country, especially in the Middle West, everybody watches everybody else for the least lapse in the democratic spirit.

Though he was truly democratic at heart, Mackworth laid it on in theatric outward appearance, in true line with the Kansas tradition of a sockless Jerry Simpson, who went without socks, as the adjective implies, and made Congress on that one platform of his sartorial lack ... of William Roscoe Stubbs, who rode into the office of governor partly on the fact that his daughter could make salt-rising bread ... a form of bread-making cultivated by the hardy pioneers of the state, and now no longer necessary.

Mackworth was "in-legged" ... that is, his legs on the insides rubbed together from the crotch to the knees ... and he wore old patches, hanging there actually in strips ... and, I think, had his trouser-seat patched, too ... and though he could have afforded a car, he drove about, he and his family, in a rickety old two-seated rig, deliberately kept, it seemed, in ill-repair ... and it was such an old ex-plow horse that dragged it about!

His fellow townsmen laughed, but they liked it. "Jarv's all right! No nonsense about Jarv, even ef he is one o' them lit'rary fellers!"

To call everybody by the first name--that was the last word in honest, democratic fellowship.

* * * * *

Whether this exterior appearance of Mackworth was sincere or affected in him I never could quite tell. I am almost inclined to believe it was not done for effect,--but out of an Assisian simplicity of heart, as a sign manual of Bourgeois integrity.

If it was an affectation, his personal attitude toward the people with whom he came into contact was not ... in his office everybody loved him, and worked for him with that easy efficiency that comes of good will and respect....

Unostentatiously and affectionately he went about helping people.

"We've got a wonderful town here ... very little vice, except that which always will be in every community because it is inherent in human nature ... we have a fine college of our own ... a fine electric plant ... everybody's lawn is well-kept ... nobody in this town need be out of a job ... for miles around us the land is rich in real wealth of waving corn and wheat....

Kansas will be the centre, the Athens, of our civilisation, one day....

We have a fine Harvey Eating House at our railway station, managed by a hustler ... you must have Ally take you there for dinner before you go back to Laurel."

The idealisation of small comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster of violets grew before."

No wonder that the _National Magazine_, starting with a splendid flourish of knight-errantry, degenerated into the mere, "let-well-enough-alone" thrift-crier it is.... "'How I Became an Expert Tombstone Salesman' ... 'How I collected Tin Foil After Work-Hours and Added Three Hundred a Year Extra to My Salary as Stenographer.'..."

Rather, far rather, the Rockefeller, that shrewd manipulator of businesses ... with all his parsimony in personal economics ... his diet of bread and milk ... and his giving away of millions to missions and scientific institutions....

Rather the big Morgan, who knew the old masters as well as he knew the weaknesses of men ... who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his grim, forbidding dignity.

This at least presented bigness and romance!

* * * * *

"Want to meet Uncle Bill?" and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room blue-thick with smoke....

I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our entry.

There sat--the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he assumed visible, hazy outline--William Struthers, known to the newspaper world as "Old Uncle Bill," the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of the ordinary.

Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire. His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped and drew up a chair for me.

"Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry," he began deprecatingly, "but I do a lot of good for folks ... folks read my stuff when they ain't got time to read the real poets."

Instead of flattering him, I gave him, frankly but gently, my opinion of the cornfed school of literature, easing the sting by inferring that he without doubt had bigger things up his sleeve than his so-called prose poems.

What I said struck the right chord.

"Of course a fellow has to make a living first."

(But, in my heart, I thought--it is just as vile for a man to send his wife out as a street-walker, and allege the excuse about having to live, as it is for a poet to prostitute his Muse.)

* * * * *

Nevertheless, Mackworth, Uncle Bill and I stood together, in the sunny street outside, posing for the photographer. And I swelled with inordinate pride. Though I knew I was bigger than both of them put together, yet, in the eyes of the world, these men were big men--and having my photograph taken with them was an indication to me, that I was beginning to come into my own.

Perhaps our picture would be reproduced in some Eastern paper or magazine ... perhaps even in the _Bookman_.

* * * * *

"Uncle Bill Struthers is an example of what Kansas can do for a man...." said Mackworth, when we were alone. "Bill, in the old days, was a sort of tramp printer ... clever, but with all his ability in him unexpressed ... he was always down and out ... and drink! It verged on dipsomania. He never held a job long ... though he was a good compositor, he was always on the move from place to place....

"Then he came to Kansas where we have prohibition ... and it has panned out in Uncle Bill's case pretty fine.

"He came to work for me ... fell by chance into his prose-poetry vein. It took; was instantly copied in all the newspapers ... of course, I could do it as well, or anyone else with a rhyming turn ... but he was the originator ... and people liked his sturdy common sense, his wholesome optimism.

"Now Bill is happy; his stuff's syndicated--in thousands of households wherever English is spoken his name is a familiar word. He gives whole communities strength to go on with the common duties of life."

"And his drinking?"

"He has conquered that entirely ... once every so often the fit comes over him--the craving for it--then, when Uncle Bill turns up missing, as the Irishman puts it, none of us worries....

"We all know he has hitched up his horse and buggy and is off, driving and driving and driving across country, to work the fit out ... no, he never touches anything stronger than tobacco and coffee now....

"In a few days he comes back ... no one says a word ... we all know ... and love and respect him....

"He's happy now, is Uncle Bill ... married a young wife ... has a home all his own ... money piling up in the bank."

* * * * *

Ally Merton smiled quizzically when I spoke of Uncle Bill to him....

"Yes, Uncle Bill's a fine, quaint old chap ... whenever he has a tiff with his wife--of course, never anything serious--he locks himself in the kitchen ... closes all the windows ... smokes up terrifically with his corncob ... and plays and plays for hours on end ... his Red Seal records of classical music of which he is so fond.

"This behaviour of his is a well-known joke among us, a joke with his wife, to!" ... the speaker paused, to continue--

"He has a good library and quite a large knowledge of the English poets."

"That makes it all the more terrible," I replied, "for if he wrote his verse-prose out of ignorance, he might be somewhat forgiven ... but he knows better."

* * * * *

I gave a lecture on Keats to a woman's club. They paid me thirty dollars for the lecture....

"Well, you surely made a killing ... those old birds will worship you for life," sniggered Ally.

* * * * *

Mackworth and I had a farewell talk before I returned to Laurel. We stood again in front of his office, on the sunny street ... he had come out to bid me good-bye.

We talked of the folk poetry of America.... Mackworth recited to me several of the songs and ballads which I have since seen in Lomax's book of Cowboy Songs.... I repeated the tale of how I had collected the jail-songs that I subsequently lost while jumping a freight....

"There's lots of poetry in American life ... Stephen Foster Collins scratched the surface of it ... but he was a song writer....

"There's poetry on farm, ranch, in small town, big city, all waiting for the transmuting touch of the true singer ... not newspaper rhymes ... neither the stock effusions on Night, Love, Death and Immortality inserted as tail-piece to stories and articles in magazines....

"There's the negro mind ...--ought to hear them sing, making up songs as they load and unload boats along the Mississippi ... nobody's ever dug back into the black mind yet--why don't you do these things?"...

* * * * *

"Good-bye, Mister Mackworth--I've had a fine time!"

"Good-bye, my boy ... be a good boy ... God bless you!"

* * * * *

At the Harvey Eating House the manager brought me out a cardboard box neatly packed, full of all manner of good things to eat....

"Good-bye, Ally! thanks for your hospitality, Ally! thank your folks for me again!"

"I will. See you up at Laurel some day soon!"

For Merton was coming to study there, in the fall.

* * * * *

Back in Laurel I resumed my studies again in my intense though haphazard way. Doctors' degrees and graduation certificates did not interest me. I meditated no career in which such credentials would stand me in stead. But the meat and substance of what the world had achieved, written, thought--it was this that I sought to learn and know.

Already the professors were beginning to row about me and report me for cutting recitations. On the score of my scholarship and my knowing my subject they had no complaint. It was that I disrupted their classes and made for lax discipline.

But I seldom cut class deliberately.... I would find myself lost in a book back in the "stack" as the big room that housed the tiers of books was called. The day would be dusking, the lights of evening glimmering below in town, to my bewildered eyes! The day gone, when I had stepped back among the books at nine o'clock, intending to while away a half hour between classes! (Once it was Sidney's Arcadia that entranced me so).

Or I would set out for class ... hatless ... my hair tousled and long ... in my sandals that were mocked at by my colleagues ... my books under arm ... and fall into a reverie that would fetch me up, two miles or so away, a-stray up a by-road flanked with a farmhouse and young cornfields.

Then it would be too late for my schoolday, and I would make a day of it ... would perhaps get acquainted with some farmer and his family, have dinner and supper at his house, and swap yarns with him and the rest of his people.

* * * * *

Jack Travers was as proud of my foot-trip to Osageville as if he had accomplished it himself.

"The boys out at the Sig-Kappa house expect three or four kegs of beer in from Kansas City ... come on out and help us to celebrate."

"But I don't drink."

"Go on! you've told me about the time you did what you called 'slopping up' down in Texas!"

"That was only once ... and since then I've become a physical culturist."

"Well, come and join the party anyhow ... it won't hurt you to look on."

My curiosity impelled me to accept the invitation to the "keg party" as such a jamboree was known among the students.

The kegs of beer waited us at the station ... disguised with misleading labels ... "chemicals, handle with care." Tenderly we loaded them on the waggon that had been hired. The driver sat smiling as the solicitious students heaved them up and secured them firmly....

We sat dignified and quiet, till the outskirts of the town were reached ... then the whip was brought down and away we whooped, bouncing along the country road....

We whipped off down the road into the open country with a roar of singing and shouting. We sat on the kegs to keep them from jumping out, as we urged the driver to ply the whip.

* * * * *

There was a corner in a cornfield that bent inward, hidden from the casual passer-by by a grove of Osage orange trees. Here we drew up, jumped out, tenderly conveyed the kegs forth ... the ground we had chosen, in the corner of the field, was too rocky for planting. It was sultry early afternoon, of a late spring day.

The driver was offered a drink.

"Nope," he shook his head, grinning wisely, "I'm a teetotaler."

"Be back for us at dark," we shouted, as he jee-d about, heading toward town again.

"Here's to old Gregory and his first drunk!"

Tin cups had been produced, and the bung of one of the barrels started ... the boys lifted their full, foaming cups in unison.

"Bottoms up!"

I joined in the drinking, despite my previous protestation that I would not....

"Where's the old boy that runs this farm?"

"All the family's probably in town, this being Saturday afternoon."

"Let's whoop 'er up, then!"

We sang and shouted at the top of our voices.

The cups had been four times filled.

Though I had poured half of mine on the ground, I already felt dizzy. But also a pleasant tingling, a warmth, was slowly increasing in my nerves and veins and body ... an increased sense of well-being permeated me. I stopped spilling my beer on the ground and drank it eagerly.