Tramping on Life Part 44

He telephoned my father ... who came over from the works, running with gladness. I was immediately taken home. I took three baths that afternoon before I felt civilised again....

My father had returned to the Composite Works. I was alone in my little room, with all my cherished books once more. They had been, I could plainly observe, kept orderly and free of dust, against cay home-coming.

I took down my favourite books, kissing each one of them like a sweetheart. Then I read here and there in all of them, observing all the old pa.s.sages I had marked. I lay in all att.i.tudes. Sprawling on the floor on my back, on my belly ... on my side ... now with my knees crossed....

Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Sh.e.l.ley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley ... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a world of actuality!...

I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof of every tale or anecdote....

I captained s.h.i.+ps, saw Chinese slaughtered by the thousands, fought bandits on the outskirts of Manila, helped loot the palace of the empress in the Sacred City at Pekin ... tales of peril and adventure that I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own experiences.

All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....

But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination, too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to me. And another dream I had--of a huge Boxer, with a cutla.s.s, standing over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped making up adventures, especially the disagreeable ones, because they eventually had more effect on me than they did on my auditors.

My father had changed boarding places ... but, as usual, it was not better food, but a little, dark widow that attracted him to that boarding house.

I now devoted myself exclusively to poetry--the reading of it. I always had a book in my pocket. I read even at meals, despite my father's protests that it was bad-mannered.

Breasted's book store, down in Newark, was where I was nearly always to be found, in the late afternoons.

It was there, in the murky light of a dying twilight, that I came Upon the book that has meant more to my life than any other book ever written....

For a long time I had known of John Keats, that there was such a poet.

But, in the fever of my adolescence, in the ferment of my tramp-life, I had not yet procured his poetry....

Now, here were his complete works, right at hand, in one volume ... a damaged but typographically intact copy....

I had, once before, dipped into his _Endymion_ and had been discouraged ... but this time I began to read him with his very first lines--his dedication to Leigh Hunt, beginning:

"Glory and loveliness have pa.s.sed away."

Then I went on to a pastoral piece:

"I stood tiptoe upon a little hill."

I forgot where I was. A new world of beauty was opened to me.... I read and read....

"Come, Gregory, it's time to close"--a voice at my elbow. It was Breasted's a.s.sistant, a little, curious man who reminded me of my sky-pilot at Sydney. He, also, wore a black, long-tailed coat. He was known as "the perfessor."

"You've been standing here as quiet as a crane for three hours."

"How much do you want for this book?"

"A quarter ... for you!" He always affected to make me special reductions, as an old customer....

A quarter was all I had. I paid for my Keats, and walked home. Walked? I went with wings on each heel. I was as genuinely converted to a new life as a sinner is converted to the Christian religion.

I lit the light in my room. All night I read and re-read, not a whit sleepy or tired.

I went for a week in a mad dream, my face s.h.i.+ning and glowing with inner ecstasy and happiness.

There did not seem to be time enough in the twenty-four hours of each day for reading and studying and writing. And a new thing came to me: a shame for my shadow thinness and a desire to build myself into a better physical man.

At that time _McFadden's Physical Culture Magazine_ was becoming widely read. I came across a copy of it. I found in it a guide to what I was in search for. Faithfully I took up physical culture. Fanatically I kept all the windows open, wore as little clothing as possible ... adopted a certain walk on tiptoe, like a person walking on egg-sh.e.l.ls, to develop the calves of my legs from their thinness to a more proportionate shape.

And, as I walked, I filled and emptied my lungs like a bellows. I kept a small statue of Apollo Belvedere on top of my bookcase. I had a print of the Flying Mercury on the wall, at the foot of my bed. Each morning, on waking, I filled my mind full of these perfect specimens of manhood, considering that by so doing I would gradually pilot my body to physical perfection.... I know that many things I say about myself will appeal to the "wit" as humorous. I can't help it if I am laughed at ... everybody would be, if they told the truth about themselves, like this.

I joined the Y.M.C.A. for the physical side, not for the spiritual. I found a spirit that I did not like there, a sort of mental deadness and ineffectually. But one thing the Y.M.C.A. did for me: I found on the bulletin board one day an announcement of the summer term of Mt. Hebron Preparatory School.... It was a school for poor boys and men ... neither age nor even previous preparation counted ... only earnestness of purpose. And, as each student had his two hours' work a day to do, the expense for each term was nominal.

I had been paid fifty dollars for my article on my adventures in the New York Sunday paper. A Newark Sunday paper bought several articles also.

To the money I had saved up my father contributed as much again. I started for preparatory school.

Mt. Hebron School consisted of a series of buildings set apart on a hill. It was an evangelical school founded by a well-known revivalist--William Moreton.

Around it lay pine forests and, at its feet, the valley of the Connecticut River.

No matter what subjects they taught, the main endeavour of its professors, in season and out, was the conversion of every freshman immediately to Evangelical Christianity, as soon as he had had his quarters a.s.signed to him....

Scarcely had we settled ourselves, each with his roommate, than the two weeks' revival began. I will not enter into the details of this revival.

This was merely the opening of the summer term. At the opening of the school year in the fall--that was when they held the _real_ revival,--and the story of the whipped-up frenzy of that will afford a more characteristic flavour.

It put a singing in my heart to find myself at last a student in a regular preparatory school, with my face set toward college.

I had pa.s.sed my examinations with credit, especially the one in the Bible. This won me immediate notice and approval among the professors.

Fortunate, indeed, I now regarded those three months in jail ... the most fruitful and corrective period of my life. For not only had I studied the Bible a.s.siduously there, but I had learned American history--especially that of the Civil War period ... and I had studied arithmetic and algebra, so that in these subjects I managed to slide through.

I was put to cleaning stalls and currying horses for my two hours' work each day. Though I hated manual labour, I bent my back to the tasks with a will, glad to endure for the fulfillment of my dream.

That first summer I took Vergil and began Homer. I had studied these poets by myself already, but found many slack ends that only the aid and guidance of a professor could clear up. And, allowing for their narrow religious viewpoints, real or affected, in order to hold their positions, they were fine teachers--my teachers of Latin and Greek--with real fire in them.... Professor Lang made Homer and his days live for us. The old Greek warriors rose up from the dust, and I could see the s.h.i.+ning of their armour, hear the clash of their swords.