Chapter 26

* * * * *

Many well-known men came to Laurel for lectures to the students.

Lyman Abbott appeared.

"The ancient bell-wether of the Standard Oil," Travers irreverently dubbed him.

The College Y.M.C.A. accorded him a reception. I was one of those invited to meet him.

After he had delivered a brief talk on God and The Soul, questions were invited--meant only to be politely put, that the speaker might shine. But my question was not put for the sake of social amenity ... though I'll admit, just a little for the sake of showing off.

"Dr. Abbott," I asked, "it is quite possible that there are other worlds in the sky--that, also, the rest of the planets either are or will be, homes for souls, for living beings equal to or higher than our present human grade of development?"

"Yes, yes, that is quite probable."

"Well, then, God, to prove a just God, would have to send his Son to be crucified a million times--once for each world ... for, if He did not, then the souls on these worlds would either be damned without a chance for salvation, or, if God made an exception in their case, that would be an unfair deal--for us to suffer from a fault other worlds are free of."

Dr. Abbott hemmed and hawed.

"It is not yet proven that there are other inhabited worlds. I an only dealing with questions of practical theology," he answered, with some heat and an attempt to be sarcastic.

The members of the Y.M.C.A. were indignant at me for putting a maladroit question.

"It doesn't do to invite Gregory anywhere. You can't tell what stuff he might pull."

"A legitimate question--" egged on Travers at my side, "bump the old boy again, Johnnie."

But I was not given another chance. After a short but painful silence the Secretary rose and put a suave and stereotyped query ... and others filled the breach in rapid succession. And the prestige of the great theologian was salvaged.

Commencement day approached. There came to deliver the address for the day, George Harvey, then editor of _Harper's Weekly_. Travers was assigned to interview Harvey....

"The fellow's a pompous big stiff," complained Jack, "the kind that makes a fetish of morning and evening dress ... wears kid gloves ... and a top hat ... he has both valet and secretary with him."

"That's no disgrace. Don't you think, Jack, that we Middle-Westerners only make fun of such people and their habits for the reason that we're either unable to do the same, or do not dare do it because of our jealousy of each other--our so-called hick democratic spirit?"

"There's a lot of truth in that. But fundamentally I would say that the newspaper editors who are here this week, holding a conference and tendering Harvey a banquet, _mean_ their plainness of dress and life ... and do not hanker after the clubman's way of life as Harvey represents it to their eyes ... you just watch for what Ed. Lowe and Billy Dorgan do to our Eastern chap at the banquet ... they'll kid him till he's sick."

That banquet will live in the memory of Kansas newspapermen.

Harvey, when he entered the hall where the journalists were already seated, first snapped his top hat sidewise to his attending valet. Then he sat down grandly.

Billy Dorgan and Ed. Lowe "rode Harvey around," as Jack phrased it. The distinguished editor, with his solemnity, invited thrusts. Besides, most of those present were what was denominated as "progressive" ... Jarvis Alexander Mackworth was there ... and Alden ... and Tobbs, afterward governor.

* * * * *

The next day Travers printed a supposititious interview with Harvey's English valet on how it felt to be a valet of a great man. Both the valet and Harvey waxed furious, it was said.

* * * * *

Arthur Brisbane visited us. He ran down from Kansas City over night. This man was Jack Travers' God ... and we of the Press or Scoop Club--a student newspaper club of which I had recently been made a member--also looked up to him as a sort of deity.

Travers informed me reverentially that Brisbane was so busy he always carried his stenographer with him, even when he rode to the Hill in an auto ... dictating an editorial as he drove along.

"A great man ... a very great man."

I won merit with Travers by reciting an incident of my factory life. Every afternoon the men in my father's department would bring in Brisbane's latest editorial to me ... and listen to me as I read it aloud. To have the common man buy a newspaper for its editorials--that was a triumph.

And Brisbane's editorials frequently touched on matters that the mob are supposed not to be interested in ... stories of the lives of poets, philosophers, statesmen....

One of the men who could barely read ... who ran his fingers along the lines as he read, asked me--

"Who was this guy SO-krats?"

It was an editorial on Socrates and his life and death that brought forth the enquiry ... after I had imparted to him what information I possessed:

"Where can I find more about him, and about that pal of his, Plato?"

* * * * *

I was hanging on to my comfortable room at the Y.M.C.A. by bluff. I had not let on to the secretary that my Belton subsidy had stopped. Instead, I affected to be concerned about its delay. But I did this, not to be dishonest, but to gain time ... I was attempting to write tramp stories, after the manner of London, and expected to have one of them accepted soon, though none ever were....

Decker, the student-proprietor of the restaurant where I ate every day, was more astute.

"Now look here, Gregory, you just can't run your bill up any higher."

I already owed him fifteen dollars.

I compounded with him by handing him over my _Illustrated History of English Literature_. It was like tearing flesh from my side to part with these volumes.

And now I had no more credit at the Y.M.C.A.

And I went back to Frank Randall, to apply again for my old room over his shop. He was using it now to store old stoves in. But he moved them out.

With a sense of despair, compensated by a feeling of sacrifice for my poetry, I found myself once more back over the tinshop, the hammers sounding and crashing below.

Old Blore, the cancer doctor, lived in a room in the front. All day long he sat drinking rum and sugar ... and shipping out his cancer cure, a white mixture like powdered sugar. Whether it did any good or not, he believed in it himself....

I have not written about him before ... there are so many odd characters that I came in contact with that I have not written about ... for this book is about myself....

But old Blore ... he came waddling back to me, drunk, as usual, on his rum and sugar.

"Welcome back, Johnnie ... come on, you and Frank, into my room ... we've got to celebrate your return."

Frank and I set down the stove we were moving, dusted our hands off, and followed.

"But I won't drink any of your rum, Ed! It's got too much of a kick."

"--nonsense ... good Jamaica rum never hurt nobody."

We drank several rounds of rum and water, with sugar. And we jocosely joined together in singing the cancer doctor's favourite hymn--"We're drifting down the stream of time, we haven't got long to stay."

Then Frank and Ed. retailed to me the practical jokes they had played on each other since I had been gone from among them ... on big Sam, the chocolate-coloured shoemaker who had his shop next door ... and an obscene one on a half-wit named Elmer, who was one of Frank's helpers ... that, though it was pretty raw, made me choke and gasp with merriment ... and they told me how, one night, they had wired the iron roof in the back, so that about ten cats that were mewling and quarrelling there, received a severe electric shock ... how funny and surprised they'd acted.

* * * * *

Most serviceably a check from the _National Magazine_ came, for twenty-five dollars ... I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships. The check ameliorated my condition. I saw my way clear to a few weeks more of regular eating.

* * * * *

Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came....

"Am on my way West. Will stop off visit you at Laurel--Penton."

* * * * *

Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City _Star_.

"KANSAS POET HONOURED ------------------------ AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM"

I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had written the _Les Miserables_ of the American workingman.

* * * * *

Harry Varden, editor of the _Cry for Right_, had been to Laurel a week previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at the house of the "comrade" where he was passing the night. The comrade sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.

Varden's monthly magazine _The World to Be_, had occasionally printed a poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.

Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion, even against himself.

I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him on one of his lecture trips....

After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ... reverently and with awe.

"Yes, yes," Varden assented, "Penton is all you say, but he has no sense of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad way, for a reformer, you know--gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so many good openings....

"When Penton was writing _The Slaughter House_ and we were running it serially, his protagonist, Jarl--it seemed he didn't know how to dispose of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired him 'for God's sake kill Jarl.' ...

"Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ... and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book."

And Harry Varden laughed excitedly like a boy, and he leaned sideways and smote his half-bent, sharp, skinny knee with his left hand. I could perceive that that was a grotesque platform gesture of his, when he drove a comic point home.

* * * * *

I was waiting at the station ... where I had shaken hands with Bob Fitzsimmons, and had seen Emma Silverman off....

Penton Baxter was due on the eleven o'clock train from Kansas City.

I surely must be on the road to becoming somebody, with all these famous people taking such an interest in me. I remembered Emerson's dictum about waiting in one's own doorway long enough, and all the world would come by.

Was I to be disappointed? It did not seem credible that the great man would make a special stop-off on his way to the coast, just to pay me a visit.

One after another the passengers stepped down and walked and rode away. Then a little, boyish-looking man ... smooth-faced, bright-complexioned, jumped down, wavered toward me, dropping his baggage ... extended his hand ... both hands ... smiling with his eyes, that possessed long lashes like a girl's.

"Are you Johnnie Gregory?"

"Penton Baxter?" I asked reverently. He smiled in response and drew my arm through his.

"This is great, this is certainly great," he remarked, in a high voice, "and I'm more than glad that I stopped off to see you."

He expanded in the sun of my youthful hero-worship.

"Where's the best hotel in town?"

"The Bellman House ... but I've arranged with the Sig-Kappas to put you up."

"Are you a fraternity man?"

"No--a barb."

"I'd rather go to the hotel you named ... but thank the boys for me."

I contended with Penton Baxter for the privilege of carrying his two grips. They were so heavy that they dragged my shoulders down, but, with an effort, I threw my chest out, and walked, straight and proud, beside him.

As we walked he questioned and questioned. He had the history of Laurel University, the story of my life, out of me, almost, by the time we had covered the ten blocks to the hotel.

"Penton Baxter!" I whispered in a low voice to the proprietor, who, as he stood behind the desk, dipped the pen with a flourish, and shoved the open register toward his distinguished guest.

* * * * *

Travers, of course, was the first to see the great novelist. He wired an interview to the _Star_, and wrote a story for the Laurel _Globe_ and the _Laurelian_.

Baxter said he would stay over for two days ... that he didn't want to do much beside seeing me ... that he would place himself entirely in my hands. I was beside myself with happy pride.

"This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the South East."

"We call it Azure Mound."

"Has it any historical interest?"

"--don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's company."

Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Shelley as he traipsed along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ... unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....

His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth was loose and cruel--like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair on an old maid's face.

More than a year later his wife confided to me that "Pennie," as she dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....

Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a rising tide of invisible opposition.

I discoursed of a new religion--a non-ascetic one based on the individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life--that I meditated inaugurating as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His face lit with frolic....

Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.

Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest, Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.

Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how, at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators ... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public office.... "Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his shoes to his hat...."

"Suppose, Mr. President," Baxter had put to him, at the same time expressing his amazement at the president's open manner of speech before men he had never even met before ... men perhaps of antagonistic shades of opinion, "suppose I should go out from here and give to the newspapers the things you have just said! How would you protect, defend yourself?"

"Young man, if you did--_as you won't_--" smashed Roosevelt, with his characteristic of clenched right fist brought down in the open palm of the left hand--"if you did--I'd simply brand you as a liar ... and shame you before the world."

"And so it was that Roosevelt expressed himself freely ... and at the same time protected himself."

* * * * *

We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it had been a hard climb.

At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State.

The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us.

"God, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it."

"Walt Mason?" I enquired, mischievously....

"No," he responded, seriously, "Walt Whitman."

"But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide, scenic vistas....

"Nevertheless," I went on, "Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we have Carrie Nation--"

"And Johnnie Gregory!" put in Baxter.

"I don't want just to belong to Kansas."

It was I who was humourless now, "I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois ideals ... I want to belong to the world--as--you do!"

We trudged back to town.

"What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!"

* * * * *

My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke.

I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making ... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered themselves slighted.

When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our first names.

"Good-bye, Johnnie!"

"Good-bye, Penton!"

"Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so conveniently."

I assured him that I would not fail.

For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_.

"My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry already."

* * * * *

The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one, and I had not followed even that closely.

"If you'll graduate," Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the Kansas fashion, "I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't believe in you, and, frankly,--say it was a mistake ever to have let you in."

Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.

"In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a detriment to the school."

"And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?"

"Yes, God pity me, I did," he jested. "I remembered how I was asked to quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were classmates....

"I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!... but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus ... it might make them more alive and interesting."

Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I sold to _Everybody's_ kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month. I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.

There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off before her, at the same time.

The Copperwell Street Show came to town. They lined the main street with booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them except at peril of his life. A gold medal was offered to anyone who would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience from the inside of the cage.

I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal's equivalent in money. I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.

I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....

"JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE ------------------------ KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,"

Jack Travers was at his facetious best.

Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia Britannica....

People looked at me both with amusement and admiring amazement as they saw me about, late that afternoon....

"Now tell me the honest truth about the lions," I asked of the trainer.

"They're a pretty bad lot."

"Come on. I've made up my mind to go in, and I'm not afraid."

"--though lions are not as bad as leopards and tigers ... there's no telling when they might jump you ... there's only one chance in a thousand that they will ... but you may bring one up from being a cub ... and, one morning, because of something you can't read in its animal mind--it not liking its breakfast or something--it may jump you, give one crunch, and snuff you out like a candle ... it's that chance that you take that makes it seem brave."

"Thanks, I'll take the chance."

"Are you sure you'll have enough command of yourself to make a speech?"

"--Certain ... I've committed to memory almost all the Encyclopedia Britannica article on lions ... I'm going to give them that...."

* * * * *

"Gregory! Gregory!" the crowd was calling, half in derisive jocularity, half in uneasy admiration....

The trainer shunted me into the cage, after seating his lions in a half-moon on their tubs.

"Quick! Step in! We'll be on the outside ready with hot irons in case anything goes wrong!"

I didn't know whether the trainer was jesting or serious.

"Don't think of them at all. They'll sit still ... you can turn your back to them and face the audience. It will be safe. Only don't make any unexpected, quick motions."

I was in among them. The door clanged behind me.

Nobody jeered now. All was filled with an expectant hush.

Then, as if strange and a-far from myself, I stepped easily into the very centre of the half moon of squatting beasts, and made my speech ... at the end, there was hardly any applause till I was safely out of the cage ... Then there was a tumult. Shouts, cat-calls, whoops, and a great noise of hearty hand-clapping.