Tramping on Life Part 56

with everybody he met ... enquiring ... questioning ... taking notes in a large, crude, misspelling hand ... trying himself to write....

We ran away from him ... Spalton ran away from him ... "this fellow will be the death of me," he remarked to me, one afternoon, with a light of pleasure and pride in his eyes, however, at being so wors.h.i.+pped. "Ah, Razorre, beware of the ignorant disciple!"

There was nothing Jack would not do for Spalton. He sought out opportunities and occasions for serving him.

And he would guide visitors over the establishment. And, coming to the office where Spalton usually sat and worked, he was heard to say once, with a wide-spread, reverential sweep of the hand--"and this, ladies and gents, is the (his voice dropping to a reverential whisper) 'Sancta Sanctoria.'"

Jack could not see so well with one eye as he could with the other. A cataract was there which gave that eye the appearance of a milky-coloured, poached egg....

Coming home from Buffalo one evening, he stepped down on the wrong side of the train, in the dusk ... perhaps from his eagerness to sit by his prophet at supper again that night--there being too long a line leaving at the station, ahead of him.

A freight was drawing out on the track opposite. And Gabby was so huge that he was rolled like a log in a jam, between the two moving trains ... when the freight had pa.s.sed, he rose and walked. He took a cab to the Artwork Studios.

All in tatters, he hurried to his room and put on another suit. He appeared at supper by the side of the Master. He narrated what had happened, amid laughter and joking. When Spalton wanted to send for his old, frail, white-headed father, the elder Spalton, who was the community doctor, Jack waved the idea aside.

"Oh, no, Master!" (Master he called Spalton, and never the familiar, more democratic John) "Oh, no, I'm all right."...

The next morning Jack did not show up for breakfast.

At ten o'clock Spalton, solicitous, went up to his room....

He shouted for help. He had found his disciple there, huge and dead, like a stranded sea-thing.

In Gabby Jack's will ... for they found one, together with a last word and testament for humanity,--it was asked of Spalton that he should conduct the funeral from the Chapel ... and read the funeral oration, written by the deceased himself ... and add, if the Master felt moved, a few words thereto of his own ... if he considered that so mean a disciple deserved it.

All work was suspended the day of Jack's funeral.

Spalton eloquently read the curious, crude composition of his disciple ... which had fine flashes, as of lightning in a dark sky, here and there, in it.

Then Spalton began adding words of his own, in praise of the deceased--

"You all know this dear comrade of ours," he began, "this dear friend whose really fine soul, while in the body--went under the appellation of Gabby Jack--"

Here Spalton broke down. He unashamedly dropped into the chair behind the reading-desk and wept aloud. He could say no more....

In _The Dawn_ for the ensuing month he put a wonderful and beautiful tribute to his disciple ... who had thoroughly loved, and believed in him.

On a cold day of blowing snow, "Pete" came tramping in to town ... his high boots laced to the knees, a heavy alpaca coat about him ... he had come all the way from Philadelphia on foot, to add his portrait to our gallery of eccentrics ... but he was not so unusual after all ... there was too much of the hungry hardness of youth in him, the c.o.c.ksureness of conceit which he considered genius.

Immediately he put Spalton to question ... and everything and everybody to question....

He irritated Spalton most by attacking doctors ... (though Spalton himself did so in his magazine) ... Spalton's father was an old family pract.i.tioner....

But the Master's revenge came.

"Pete" fell sick. Spalton sent for his father to doctor him. And made the old man use a strong horse-medicine on him ... which he himself brought up from the stables....

"The boy is such an a.s.s ..." Spalton told me laughingly, "that it's a veterinarian he needs, not a doctor."

There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle, shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his favourite topic of bird and beast and flower. In personal appearance he was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick, perky, deprecative step....

"--queer fish," John remarked of him, "but, Razorre, you ought to come on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ...

when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in his simpleness, and drowned...."

We followed him, and watched him....

There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick suns.h.i.+ne, on his mouth....

And after a while the birds came down to him ... pecked all around him ... and a squirrel climbed up on his shoulder ... he seemed to have an attraction for the wild things ... it wasn't as if they just accepted him as a part of the surroundings ... the man sat there like a stump till we grew tired watching, and returned to camp....

Each day he spent most of the day, immobile, like that....

"Say Razorre," the Master continued, after a thoughtful pause, "you know you nuts are teaching me a lot of things....

"The trouble with the educated, regular folks is that they lose so much by drawing the line ... often everything that is spontaneous and fine.... This thing called G.o.d, you know, draws the line nowhere....

"If 'Crazy' Speedwell fell heir to a large sum of money, his relatives could find a commission of physicians anywhere, who would honestly have him into custody for lunacy ... yet, in some respects, he is the wisest and kindest man I have ever known ... though, in others, he is often such a fool as to try my patience very hard, at times."

Most of us who had arrived at "The Studios" from "foreign" parts, slept in the common dormitory.

We held frequent "roughhouses" there, the younger of us ... to the annoyance of Speedwell. Spalton finally gave him permission to sleep and live, alone, in the shed where the fire-truck and hose was stored....

One night, for malicious fun, a beak-nosed young prize-fighter, and several others (including myself) sneaked into his abode while he slept ... thoughtlessly we turned the gas on and tiptoed out again....

Not long after he came staggering forth, half-suffocated....

Everybody laughed at the tale of this ... at first Spalton himself laughed, our American spirit of rough joking and horse-play gaining the uppermost in him ... but then he recalled to mind the seriousness of our practical joke, and burned with anger at us over what we had done. And he threatened to "fire" on the spot anyone who ever again molested "Crazy" Speedwell....

"Old Pfeiler" we called him....

Pfeiler had attended one of Spalton's lectures at Chicago.

Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth and travel....

He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton's lecture. Spalton brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios.