Part 3

So I fastened my fat green wooden gentleman to the gut, and the gut to the line, and attaching a stone, flung him in the air. Behold, he flew like a grasshopper and disported with the winds. But when he settled at last on the surface of that green and snowy lake, he always made a most rapid progress toward the shore. I sailed him like a boat. No fish came, and even our faith remained unrewarded.

Was not this adventure prophetically put in verses in _Alice_, where some one sent a message to the fish, telling them, this is what I wish. And the little fishes’ answer was--“We cannot do it, sir, because,”--the little fishes, as was disclosed later, were in bed.

We sat down together in a place like the heath in Macbeth, and the weird sisters were ready to appear, had we been evil. The sun had set, winds were blowing from four directions at the same time, and it was bitterly cold. A tiny fire of roots peeped at us and smoked and chattered, and we tried hard to get warm at it. We looked at the mountain-walls, we looked at our maps and compasses. We thought of the night and of our empty wallets and insides. “Just think of Broadway at this minute,” said Vachel. “Still sweltering in heat, not yet lighted up for evening pleasure.” We felt far from civilisation, and sighed at last for what we despised. “Or think of Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue,” said I, “all a-swarm with the light-hearted summer crowd of London.”

“Well, we can’t sleep here,” said I at length.

“Let us make one last attempt to get over to the other side.”

Vachel seemed surprised, but agreed with alacrity: “I’m for it,” said he.

_The greedy old mountains have been to our knapsacks And eaten up most of our food. They’ve swallowed our breath and silenced our speech. But they haven’t broken our hearts. It takes more than a mountain to do that!_

VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS

MY companion has a curious old-man-of-the-woods appearance. It is not his loose red handkerchief round his neck so much as his hanging, dead-branch-like arms. His face sleeps even when he is awake. He walks when he is tired in a patient, dog-like way, treading in my very steps. No ribald songs, now, of tramping days--but as if hushed by the hills he croons ever to himself--

O Beulah land, sweet Beulah land, Lo, on thy topmost mount I stand,

and in a sort of hymnal marching step, like way-worn pilgrims, we take the trackless way upward once again. And it is late twilight. Sombre hope and patience dwell in our hearts as we trudge, trudge upward.

By slow stages we reach a new possible pass, and every time we stop and turn round and sit down to rest we face the lake. On three sides the descent to the water is precipitous, and an overhanging snow-crust goes round. In the late light the surface of the lake is a still, viscous green and the mountain above it a calm blood-red. The snow patches on the mountain are of fantastic shape and give an idea of futurist designs. We stare at the patches and see in one of them a ferocious white tiger, stalking forward with a demented white cat on its back. In another we see an Egyptian figure, slender, with veiled features of awful and eternal significance. These grow in the dusk. The winds chase over us, and when they pass there are moments of windlessness, and we watch hurrying grey rags of clouds running over the brow of the ridge above us and losing themselves in thin air.

It is a romantic climb. We support each other up the steep, sitting down every twenty paces in breathlessness. Vachel sits with his head on my shoulder and I with my head on his. In a minute or so we recover and sit up straight, in the half darkness, and pick up flat stones and try to make them skid over the snow patches. For a moment I was taken back to the romantic vein of “Parsifal” as I saw it in Vienna, last May, and we were Wagnerian pilgrims, toiling upwards in the ecstacy of mystical opera. Somewhere below us, in the lake, all the violins should sob and croon together and aspire, yes, aspire and throb, and the drums should start the gods to look at us. But we treated the matter in light vein. “The Bacon-eaters,” said Vachel _sotto voce_. “Seventh reel.”

* * * * *

A MIGHTY final effort brought us to the top. I shall not soon forget the dramatic sensation of seeing the new sky which suddenly began to lift itself into our view from out the other side of the mountain, a sky with more light, for it lay in the West. It was as if the prison-wall of the mountain had been thrown down and that which prisoners dream about and rave about had been given us.

And there was a way down. It was night and nothing, but we found a narrow gully on the other side, five or six feet broad, two or three thousand feet down, and an appalling steepness. This gully was all loose stones and boulders which the slightest touch sent clattering or thundering to the bottom. We were nerved to the descent by what we had gone through and by our joy at finding a way out.

I took the lead, clutched the rock wall for support, and began to slip downward, tentatively and cautiously. But directly I started, a wonderful thing occurred. I found the whole body of loose stones under my feet moved with me, and I began a progress as on a moving staircase, down, down, down, as in Jules Verne’s _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_--easily, steadily. Pleasure in this was, however, rudely disturbed. Lindsay had started downward behind me and was naturally starting a movement of rocks on his own, and suddenly a leg-breaking boulder flew past on my track with dumfounding acceleration. I climbed, therefore, away from the moving staircase into a cleft of the rock and waited for the poet to draw level.

* * * * *

IT was dark night now, and as the rocks from Lindsay’s feet rushed past they struck bright sparks in the gloom. How they crashed! How they thundered and lurched and thumped, and thumped again, and thudded into the abyss below, and how the little stones rattled after them! We agreed to go downward in short spells, one at a time, and then go into shelter and wait till we drew level again. And as we sat side by side in the gloom we looked to the great mountains on the other side of the new valley and discerned a colossal figure nine in snow, staring at us out of the darkness. It was eerie. It needed a deal of nerve to go on.

And we did not go much further. At one point I thought I saw two human beings, or they might have been bears, struggling slowly upward toward us. I shouted to them and they stopped. But they made no reply and just glowered menacingly upward. That was the end for me. I would go no further. I gave the halloo to Lindsay and got into shelter. He came down the way I had come, laboriously, cautiously, like some weather-beaten old soldier, a skulker from beyond human ken. And he also desired to do no more that night. So we lay in a lair of a beast on the brink of a sheer cliff, far, as it happened, above mist and cloud and a rain that was falling below, and slumbered the night away.

_The Guardsman and the Western Bard_[1] _Went hiking hand in hand. They felt uplifted much to see The prospects wide and grand. “A thousand leagues,” said one, “Oh Steve, From any boardwalk band.”_

_“How fine the air, immense the view! The trees are large and green. See! Here are glades and crystal rills, And every scent and petal fills_

_Our souls with pure ecstatic thrills. Afflatus holds the scene!” The Guardsman pointed to the sun. “It’s supper time, I mean.”_

_And as they munched the cracker thin And quaffed eau naturel, The gates of heaven were oped--and all Its liquid contents fell. They felt the truth that bards have sung: Heaven is a limpid well._

_Then night came on, that covers all Of high and mean degree, The king, the clown, the russet gown, The land, the clouds, the sea. “And yet I scarcely feel,” said one, “It really covers me.”_

_Long time they sought sweet slumber’s balm, Kind antidote to care. “O soft embalmer,” was their psalm That filled the mountain air. Embalmer! Something rough in pine Was as all they wanted there._

_A chilly dawn illumed the East, Most wonderfully wet. And evermore their pangs increased, Nor heaven’s libations ever ceased ... (No further messages released They’re on that mountain yet)._

[1] Contributed by “Rusticus” to the _New York Evening Post_ at this point in our adventures.

IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER”

“I SUFFERED forty-seven separate chills,” said the poet. “And forty-seven separate cramps,” said I. Did we sleep? Six hours passed somehow and it seemed not so long as waiting that time for a train or for a theatre to open. Lindsay lay in a sort of hole. I lay with my head half over the abyss. I watched the stars swim out of the clouds above. I saw the blackness of the bottomless below us become grey as the clouds formed there. Lindsay cried out once: “I’m getting up to light a fire.” “Impossible!” I rejoined. “There’s no wood, and no place to light it.”

“I am afraid the clouds are below us; we may have to stay up here all day,” I whispered, an hour before dawn. But it was all the same to the poet, whose thoughts were entirely in the present.

Destiny, however, was kind to us. The clouds at last lifted and drifted, and angels at sunrise lifted white curtains and smiled at us.

A couple of old woe-begone weather-beaten tramps lifted themselves up cautiously and peeped at the wilderness. Last night’s nerve had gone. With backs bent, and sometimes on hands and knees, they picked their way gingerly down to the far snow dump beneath, to the first wind-missed bits of mountain forest, to the first tinkling stream, and to the first chalice anemones and pink paint-brush flowers. We washed and we dressed, and we slept and washed again, and put snow inside our hats--for the morning had become rapidly hot--and we descended. The streamlet foamed down its rocky bed, and we waded and jumped and clung to its sides. And other streams flowed into it and made it deeper and the current stronger, and it splashed us above the waist. We waded knee-high through pools where shadowy fishes darted, and we sat to rest on shiny rocks in the water and talked of desirable foods. We scanned the map of the Geological Survey and stared at our compasses and considered the contours of the hills, and at length were rewarded by the sight of a real human horse trail with indisputable hoof-marks upon it.

* * * * *

WE found this in the afternoon, and for three hours followed doggedly, without meeting a soul. At last, to our great joy, we came upon a trivial enough thing, and that was a piece of candy wrapping. “Those who eat candy do not stray far from the place where candy was bought,” said I sententiously.

“Well argued, sir,” said Lindsay. “I fully agree.”

And, indeed, before sunset the happy augury was fulfilled, and we found a camp much used by Montana fishermen. Curiously enough, though all other wild things are preserved in the National Park, the fishes are allowed to be caught. In our opinion, however, after some experience, the fishes do not stand in need of protection.

At the camp we resumed acquaintance with the human race in the person of the keeper and his wife, a fire-ranger, and a hired maid called Elsie. They filled up our cans and gave us a pail of boiling water to wash our clothes, and thread for our trousers and coats, and a week’s rations to take us to “The Sun.” They were disappointed that we would not buy bacon.

“Bacon,” said the camp keeper, “is my long suit.” But Vachel vowed he had gone over to the Mosaic point of view, and didn’t care if he never tasted bacon again.

Instead, we “filled up” with corn-beef hash and took into our packs raisins and grape-nuts and butter; double quantities of bread and sugar and milk, and nine packets of comforting lozenges. And we saw by the Spokane _Advertiser_ of some remote date that the King and Queen of England had been to Ascot races in person, and no one knew what was happening in Ireland, or whether De Valera was a Protestant or a Catholic, and the fire-ranger confessed he did not know the ins and outs of Sinn Fein. And no, there had not been a forest fire this year yet, though he evidently lived in hope.

* * * * *

SO the poet and I fortified ourselves materially and spiritually, and set off again for the North-west. We started on our new rations and had one of the most jovial of meals in a place where evidently people had once camped before. We found the charred circles of old camp-fires in the grass.

While we were resting under the trees, and in the gleam of the firelight, Vachel told me the story of how once, in Kansas, he “ate down” his landlord. He had hired himself out with a gang of others to harvest the wheat on the land of a certain German farmer. All the week-days they “piled the golden sheaves,” and it was a red-hot July. The men ate as much as they were able, slept in barns on the hay when the day was done, slept like the dead, rose with the dawn, and certainly did bring in the wheat. For this they got two dollars fifty a day and were proud of their gains.

On Sunday, however, work was suspended, and the gang just lazed and dozed and ate. The German was a pious Catholic, and said a longish grace before and after meals. As the gang were rather sheepish regarding religion, they generally let one course pass, just to avoid the grace, and came slouching in as the meal went on. But Vachel started in with the first grace, right level with the farmer himself. Whatever he had Vachel had. He had several helpings of everything on the table, and as each of the ten harvest hands came in Vachel started afresh with him, and as he had hash he had hash. As each man thought he had done, he slunk out so as to avoid the second grace. The farmer kept piously waiting for all the men to get finished, and helping himself with them, too, just for company.

At last all seemed to have finished and gone, and the farmer was about to pronounce the final blessing when he had an afterthought and took another piece of pie. So Vachel also took another piece of pie. Then mechanically the last grace was said. “I went over to the barn and lay down and slept,” says Vachel. “By supper time I was ready for another meal, and I sat down again with the farmer before the rest of the gang had arrived and grace was said. The farmer was about to help himself when suddenly he paused, spoon in hand, and sat back in his chair, looking ill.”

Then, in a loud, stentorian voice he called to the kitchen: “Wife, give me the pain-killer.”

He had a violent fit of indigestion. Wife then brought a large bottle labelled PAIN-KILLER, an astonishing bottle, about a foot long, that looked as if it might be horse liniment, and the farmer took his dose with a large iron spoon. “A terrible stuff,” says Vachel, “a stuff that just eats the inside out of you, one part turpentine, three alcohol, and the rest iron rust. It gives you such a heat you forget about your indigestion.”

So the farmer had his pain-killer, but he did not eat any supper, and the poet and the rest of the gang as they came went gaily on and ate to the end. “I began with each man as he came in and ate him down,” says my hungry companion suggestively. “And the farmer, tasting nothing, had to wait till all were through to say the final grace. We finished at last and went all of us to the barns to sleep till Monday morning and the hour when we returned again to the golden line.”

_The kiss by hopeless fancy feigned On lips that are for others, Does not compare with the imaginary meal You eat when the wallet is empty. The kiss too, when you get it, Oft proves a disillusion; But the first meal after an involuntary fast, Well! It takes a real poet to describe that!_

X. CLEAR BLUE

AFTER telling me how he “ate down” the farmer, Vachel rested and passed into a halcyon mood. We had a heavenly day climbing towards a heaven of unclouded blue. Swinburne flowed more naturally from the poet’s lips than conversation:

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran.

His thought soared with our steps.

As the sea gives her shells to the shingle The earth gives her streams to the sea,

he declaimed to the streams. I promised to arrange a Swinburne recital for him next time he came to England. For I soon found that he knew as much Swinburne by heart as he did of his own poetry. Ellery Sedgwick wrote me from Boston that to tramp with a poet would be “Some punkins,” and one may say it was when the poet all day long was a living fountain of verse. I had but to mention a poem and Lindsay poured it forth to the skies. We bathed in a waterfall in the heat of noon, which was also a Swinburnian joy, and we splashed in melting snow whilst our shoulders were burned by the sun and inured ourselves to sun and ice.

The sun literally blistered the skin, and we reclined in it on scarlet shelving rocks and cooked our luncheon. All the while Vachel recited Swinburne’s “Ode to Athens,” addressing the walls of a great mountain cirque which drooped in snow curtains and hanging gardens of silver water.

Up there came to us after lunch a yellowish-grey animal with sprawling hind legs and stupid benevolent snout and whistled at us--_fee-fo, fee-fo_,--a whistling marmot. As I tried to approach him he snuggled off to the snow-field whence he had come, disappeared under the crust, and presently reappeared from a hole in the midst of the snow and began chasing chipmunks in and out of the snow holes.

* * * * *

WE resumed our journey upward, and all was well. The grass was emerald, the paint-brush was bright ruby. Swallow-tailed butterflies aeroplaned to our feet. The valley was broad and clear without mystery or horror. The waterfalls hung like the gardens of Babylon. An opal lake below us changed and waxed in iridescent glory and caused whispers of rapturous interest. And the mountain we were on was the one of the great figure nine made of snow, which had so thrilled us and appalled us when we saw it afar at night some days before. When we had gone to the top of it we had reached the great divide, where the waters flow north, south, and west toward Hudson’s Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific. At least, so the topographers assure us, and we must take their word. Vachel says we will not wait for rain and see the rain-drops hit the mountain-top and divide automatically into three parts.

So we descended at dusk into a verdant valley, with low trees growing wide apart, and waist-high flowering daisies and basket grass, and sunflowers--all as fresh and fair as if gardened for us yesterday. There were serried ranks of flowers. The tall mullein stalks became so thick that they looked like a wooden fencing in the twilight. Looking upward we saw a crimson mountain, a brown mountain, and a green mountain. Looking downward, afar, we saw many forests, separated by streams, sleeping before us. And we slept in a thicket and were made music to by the nymphs of the seven waterfalls of Shadow Mountain.

* * * * *

VACHEL LINDSAY belongs to a sect of primitive Christians called “Disciples of Christ.” They are followers of Alexander Campbell, and are called “Campbellites” in America, much as members of the Catholic and Apostolic community are called Irvingites in England. They are akin to the Baptists, being emphatically “immersionists.” Among other notable people who belong to this brotherhood is Mr. Lloyd George, and it has been suggested that the British statesman be asked to address a general convention of the Disciples if he comes to America. The chief virtue in the sect lay doubtless in an attempted return to primitive historical Christianity in all its simplicity. Not that the poet is a narrow sectarian. How could a poet be? But he has drunk deep of the primitive spirit in Christianity, and is very near to children, negroes, Indians, and the elemental types in men and women. He loves oratory more than reason, and impulse more than thought. Hence, no doubt, the well of his poetry.

We talked of the modern cult of mediævalism and the Chesterton-Belloc group as we resumed our tramp, and we discussed G. K. Chesterton’s visit to America. Lindsay felt that Chesterton counted for a great deal in America. He was not merely a celebrity. He had the reputation of a Socrates eager to converse with youth. But when he came to America he did not really come. “He has been Barnumised as Oliver Lodge was Barnumised,” said the poet. “It’s the worst of commercialised lecturing. Literary lions are imported by speculative impresarios and then put to the American people entirely from a dollar point of view. The organisations that can pay five hundred dollars for a visit get their Chesterton. But how about the universities and colleges and small groups, the real intelligentsia of America--the people who have a creative interest in what a thinker and critic has said and in what he says? A similar mistake was made with Alfred Noyes, who was booked as the man who made poetry pay. It created a false impression and did much injury when there was an opportunity for great good.” Vachel Lindsay’s idea is that two or three literary men and women should be chosen each year as the guests of the nation, and that they should be sponsored by the magazines and the universities. In that way they would meet the American nation and not merely the brassy front of American business.

* * * * *

WITH this subject we plunged through the rank undergrowth of the forest, following our north-westerly way, which should bring us to St. Mary’s Lake and the steps of “Going to the Sun Mountain.” We gathered our first potful of black currants and stewed them with sugar for our luncheon, and we had our daily dip in the rushing waters of Red Eagle Creek. It was a warm valley, and the west wind, surcharged with moisture from the Pacific, had expressed itself in a great floral exuberance, in ripe raspberries, currants, and gooseberries, and in forests of firs, which lay against the steep mountain-sides like feathers against a bird’s wing.

Vachel indulged his passion for the West and all that the West means to an American. He has memorised at some time or other the map of the United States, and can draw it and put in all the States in a few minutes. He drew it on a scrap of paper as we rested at sunset, putting in the far Western States first--Washington and Oregon like two sugar-boxes on top of one another, and then the key-shape of Utah, whose southern line is roughly the southern line of Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia, and whose northern line is the northern line of California and Nevada, and approximately of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.