Tramping on Life Part 53

"Oh, you mean Mr. Spalton?"

"Yes."

"That's him ... there ... choppin' wood."

There was a young man and an older one, both chopping wood, in the back of a building, but in fairly open view.

I walked to where they worked with both inward and outward trepidation, for, to me, Spalton was one of the world's great men.

Just as I reached the spot, the younger of the two threw down his axe.

"So long, Dad! now I'll go into the shop and tend to those letters."

I stood in the presence of the great Roderick Spalton himself, the man who, in his _Brief Visits to the Homes of Famous Folk_, had written more meatily and wisely than any American author since Emerson ... the man whose magazine called _The Dawn_, had rendered him an object of almost religious veneration and wors.h.i.+p to thousands of Americans whose spirits reached for something more than the mere piling of dollars one on the other....

I stood before him, visibly overwhelmed. It was evident that my silent hero-wors.h.i.+p was sweet to him. He bespoke me gently and courteously.

"So you want to become an Eoite?"

"Yes," I whispered, bending my gaze humbly before his.

"And what is your name, my dear boy."

"John Gregory, Master!"

"What have you brought with you? where is your baggage?"

"I--I lost my baggage ... all I have with me is a-a r-razor."

He leaned his head back and laughed joyously. His lambent brown eyes glowed with humour. I liked the man.

"Yes, we'll give you a job--Razorre!" he a.s.sured me, calling me by the nickname which clung to me during my stay....

"Take that axe and show me what you can do."

I caught up the axe and fell to with enthusiasm. The gospel of the dignity and worth of labour that he preached thrilled in me. It was the first time I ever enjoyed working....

As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me for years--as if I, too, were Somebody.

There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant, clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, wors.h.i.+pped whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of his best. For the first time I saw what human language is for. I thought of Goethe at Weimar ... Wilde's clever conversation in London....

Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment, instead of the environment of modern, commercial America--the spirit of which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....

Modern, commercial America--where we proudly make a boast of lack of culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed, makes one's hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive.

That night, at supper, I caught my first glimpse of the Eoites in a body. The contrast between them and my school-folk was agreeably different. I found among them an atmosphere of good-natured greeting and raillery, that sped from table to table. And when Spalton strode in, with his bold, swinging gait (it seemed that he had just returned from a lecture in a distant city early that afternoon), there was cheering and clapping.

Guests and workers joined together in the same dining hall, with no distinctive division.... I sat next to Spalton's table, and a warm glow of pleasure swept through me when he sent me a pleasant nod.

"h.e.l.lo, Razorre," he had greeted me; then he had turned to the group at his table and told them about me, I could see by their glances--but in a pleasant way.

The next morning I was at work in the bindery, smearing glue on the backs of unbound books. My wage was three dollars a week and "found," as they say in the West. Not much, but what did it matter? There was a fine library of the world's cla.s.sics, including all the liberal and revolutionary books that I had heard about, but which I could never obtain at the libraries ... and there were, as a.s.sociates and companions, many people, who, if extremely eccentric, were, nevertheless, alive and alert and interested in all the beautiful things Genius has created in Art and Song....

Derelicts, freaks, "nuts" ... with poses that outnumbered the silver eyes in the peac.o.c.k's tail in mult.i.tude ... and yet there was to be found in them a sincerity, a fineness, and a genuine feeling for humanity that "regular" folks never achieve--perhaps because of their very "regularness."

Here, at last, I had found another environment where I could "let loose"

to the limit ... which I began to do....

In the first place, there was the matter of clothes. I believed that men and women should go as nearly naked as possible ... clothing for warmth only ... and, as one grew in strength and health through nude contact with living sun and air and water, the body would gradually attain the power to keep itself warm from the health and strength that was in it.

So, in the middle of severe winter that now had fallen on us, I went about in sandals, without socks. I wore no unders.h.i.+rt, and no coat ...

and went with my s.h.i.+rt open at the neck. I wore no hat....

Spalton himself often went coatless--in warm weather. His main sartorial eccentricity was the wearing of a broad-brimmed hat. And whenever he bought a new Stetson, he cut holes in the top and jumped on it, to make it look more interesting and less shop-new ... of course everybody in the community wore soft s.h.i.+rts and flowing ties.

We addressed each other by first names and nicknames. Spalton went under the appellation of "John." One day a wealthy visitor had driven up.

Spalton was out chopping wood.

"Come here, John, and hold my horses."

Spalton dropped the axe and obeyed.

Afterward he had been dismissed with a fifty cent tip.

He told the story on himself, and the name "John" stuck.

Working in the bindery, I began to find out things about the community of Eos that were not as ideal as might be ... most of the illumination of the books was done by girls, even by children after school hours. The outlines of the letters and objects to be hand-illumined were printed in with the text, the girls and children merely coloured them between the lines.

In each department, hidden behind gorgeous, flowing curtains, were time-clocks, on which employees rang up when they came to work, and when they left. Also, each worker was supposed to receive dividends--which dividends consisted in pairs of mittens and thick woolen socks distributed by the foremen at Christmas time ... or maybe an extra dollar in pay, that week.

"Two dollars a week less than a fellow would draw at any other place that ran the same sort of business," grumbled a young bookbinder who was by way of being a poet, "and a pair of woolen mittens or socks, or an extra dollar, once a year, as dividends!"

However, I think that the artworkers had finer lodgings and board than most workers could have supplied for themselves ... and the married couples lived in nicer houses ... and they heard the best music, had the best books to read, lived truly in the presence of the greatest art and thought of the world ... and heard speak in the chapel, from time to time, all the distinguished men of the country ... who came, sooner or later, to visit Spalton and am? community....

What though the wages were not so big, what though you rang up the time of arrival at work and the time of departure from it, on hidden time-clocks, what though every piece of statuary, every picture, every stick of furniture, had, on the bottom of it, its price label, or, depending from it, its tag that told the price at which it might be bought!...

Spalton had begun his active career as a business man, had swung out from that, his fertile mind glimpsing what worlds of thought and imagination lay beyond it!

But now Big Business was calling him back again, using him for its purposes.