Tramping on Life Part 51

All that I had in my head, when the pistol cracked, was to _run!_ ...

all I felt about me was only a pair of mad legs.

I licked out, neither seeing nor caring ... almost feeling my way along the rim of the track with my toes, as I ran--as if I had racing eyes in them. There was a continuous roar that rose and fell like the sea. But I neither saw nor heeded. I just ran and ran.

On the home-stretch a fellow came breast to breast with me. It was Learoyd ... running low like a swallow skimming the ground. But it didn't worry me. I was calm, just floating along, it seemed to me.

I saw Dunn throwing his camera into the air, in the forefront of the seething crowd. He was crying for me to come on. The camera fell in a smashed heap, unregarded.

Barely, with my chest flung out, I took the tape ... trailing off ... I ran half a lap more, with my cla.s.s leaping grotesquely and shouting, streaming across field after me--before I had my senses back again, and realised that the race was over.

"Did I win? Did I win? Did I win?" I asked again and again.

"Yes, you won!"

I was being carried about on their shoulders.

"A little more, and we'd have to take you over to the hospital,"

commented Smythe, as he looked at me, while I lay p.r.o.ne on my back, resting, under shelter of the tent.

"Who--who used up all this witch-hazel?" he asked of the rubbers....

I hid my face in the gra.s.s, pretending to groan from the strain I had just undergone. Instead, I was smothering a laugh at myself ... at the school ... at all things....

"G.o.d and witch-hazel," I wanted to shout hysterically, "hurrah for G.o.d and witch-hazel."

Then I rose shakily to my feet, and, flinging myself loose from those who offered to help me, I ran at a good clip, in my sneakers, dangling my running shoes affectionately--to my solitary room ... with a bearing that boasted, "why, I could run all those three races over again, one right after the other, right now ... no, I'm not tired ... not the least bit tired!"

That night, in the crowded dining hall, the ovation for me was tremendous.

"I'll smash life just like those races," I boasted, in my heart.

But my triumph and eminence were not to last long.

To be looked up to at Mt. Hebron you had to lead a distasteful, colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen anywhere before. Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never found more pettiness. First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself where you had arrived.

I could not stand my half self-hypnotised hypocrisy any longer. A spirit of mischief and horseplay awoke in me. I perpetrated a hundred misdemeanours, most of them unpunishable elsewhere, but of serious import in schools and barracks, where discipline is to be maintained. I stayed out of bounds late at night ... I cut cla.s.ses continually. I visited Fairfield ... and a factory town further south, where I lounged about the streets all day, talking with people.

Professor Stanton, not to my surprise, sent for me again.

Yet I was amazed at what he knew about me, amazed, too, to discover the extent of the school's complicated system of pious espionage that checked up the least move of every student.

Stanton brought out a sheet of paper with dates and facts of my misbehaviour that could not be controverted....

"So we will have to ask you to withdraw from the school, unless you right-about-face ... otherwise, we have had enough of you ... in fact, if it had not been for your great promise--your talents!--"

I waved the compliment aside rather wearily.

"I think that if this school has had enough of me, I have had about enough of the school."

I expressed, in plain terms, my opinion of their espionage system.

"Your omnipotent G.o.d must be hard put to it when He has to rely on the help of such sneakiness to keep His Book (and I couldn't help laughing at the literary turn I gave to my denunciation) before the public!"

Stanton's eyes flamed behind their gla.s.ses.

"Gregory, I shall have to ask you to leave the Hill as soon as you can get your things together," he shouted.

"--which can hardly be soon enough for me," I replied.

"Come, my boy," continued Stanton, as if ashamed at himself for his outburst, and putting his hand on my shoulder, "you're a good sort of boy, after all ... you have so much in you, so much energy and power ...

why don't you put it to right uses?... after your father has made such sacrifices for you, I hate to see you run off to a ravelled edge like this.

"Even yet, if you'll only promise to behave and preserve a proper dignity in the presence of the other students--even yet we would be glad to have you stay and graduate ... and we might be able to procure you a scholars.h.i.+p at Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Brown. Lang says you put yourself into the spirit of Homer like an old Greek, always doing more work than the requirements,--and Dunn says, that you show him things in Vergil that he never saw before."

Moved, I shook my head sadly. I hated myself for liking these people.

"If you mean that I should be like other people ... I just can't ...

it's neither pose nor affectation." (He had intimated that some of the professors alleged that as the core of the trouble.) "I guess I don't belong here ... yes, it would be better for me to go away!"

That night, un.o.bserved, I stole into the chapel that stood on the Crest of the hill, against the infinite stars.

I spent nearly all the night in the chapel, alone. The place was full of things. I felt there all the G.o.ds that ever were wors.h.i.+pped ... and all the great spirits of mankind. And I perceived fully how silly, weak, grotesque, and vain I was; and yet, how big and wonderful, it would be to swim counter, as I meant, to the huge, swollen, successful currents of the commercial, bourgeois practicality of present-day America.

I pinned up a sign on the bulletin board in the hall, in rhyme, announcing, that, that afternoon, at four o'clock, John Gregory would hold an auction of his books of poetry.

My room was crowded with amused students. I mounted the table, like an auctioneer, while they sat on my cot and on the floor, and crowded the door.

At first the boys jeered and pushed. But when I started selling my copy of Byron and telling about his life, they fell into a quiet, and listened. After I had made that talk, they clapped me. Byron went for a dollar, fetching the largest price. I sold my Sh.e.l.ley, my Blake, my Herrick, my Marvell, my Milton ... all....

My Keats I could not bring myself to sell. I kept that like a treasure.

What I could not sell I gave away.

My entire capital was ten dollars ... one suit of clothes ... a change of underwear ... two s.h.i.+rts. I discarded my trunk and crammed what little I owned into my battered suitcase.

That night, the story of my dismissal from school having travelled about from mouth to mouth, and the tale of my poets' auction--the boys cheered me, as I came into the dining hall--cheered me partly affectionately, partly derisively.

In the morning mail I received a letter from the New York _Independent_, a weekly literary magazine. Dr. Ward, the editor, informed me that I possessed genuine poetic promise, and he was taking two of the poems I had recently submitted to him, for publication in his magazine.

Like the vagrant I was, I considered myself indefinitely fixed, with that ten dollars. I went to Boston ... hung about the library and the waterfront ... stayed in cheap lodging houses for a few days--and found myself on the tramp again.