Tramping on Life Part 69

"I'm going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot."

"Great! 'Vagabond Poet' Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan. It's only ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ...

but you'll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can get the story in in time for this Sunday's _Era_...."

Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.

"Come on, we'll walk up an alley and I'll snap you just as if you were on the way...."

"No, I won't do that!"

--"won't do what?"

--"won't fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will have to be on the way!"

"Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo you'll have to plough through?" he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud, grumbling, to the edge of town.

There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in my hand.

Travers waved me good-bye. "You'll see the story in the _Era_ Sunday sure," he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.

It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great s.h.i.+p riding on the horizon, rode the hill, with its cl.u.s.ter of university buildings.

My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the impractical,--the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks and small business men bred in my people for generations!...

I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and sliding. Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets.

But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to my knees. And the "squash-squis.h.!.+" of my soaked feet in the mud plodded a steady refrain of misery.

My Keats, at least, was dry. I kept the volume under my belt and against my naked belly.

And I was happy and buoyed up by the thought, which lessened my discomfiture, that Sunday morning thousands of readers in comfortable homes would be reading about me, would gaze upon my photograph.

People looked out of their farmhouse windows at me as if an insane man were stalking by.

It darkened rapidly.

My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more a usual thing to beg or ask for shelter.

I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly escaping from the edge of spilled mola.s.ses.

I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most.

The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped and dripped.

And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit.

Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that _I_ was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas....

And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we were on the _Maria Crowther_ ... we were still off the coast of England, and I had gone ash.o.r.e for the last touching of my foot on English soil....

There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth....

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human sh.o.r.es,..."

The evening star made me dream of immortality and love--my love for f.a.n.n.y Brawne....

Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ...

voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of Bacchus in _Endymion_ ... that was a big poem, after all....

Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....

"Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me."

"Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--"

"Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed at that--for a time!)

I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall, like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.

The ma.s.s of resistance I had to face, for poetry's sake, was too enormous ... my country's motto was not "beauty is truth, truth beauty,"

but "blessed be that man who can make two hills of corn grow where one bank of violets grew before," ... and my pilgrimage, in that hour of vision, it disgusted me ... for I was making it not to some grand poet like L'Estrange, but to the home of the chief exponent of the "Honest-to-G.o.d, No-Nonsense-About-Me Hick School of Literature" ... and a.s.sociated with him was the syndicate poet, William Struthers, called familiarly Uncle Bill, whose daily jingles run together as prose, were now making him a fortune.

With the coming of dawn the day cleared, the sun glistened on a thousand puddles, making them silver and gold....

By walking carefully on the side of the road, I made progress less muddy. I was used to the squas.h.i.+ng of the water in my shoes. The weather turned warmer.

I found myself on the usual long one-street called Main Street, in the prosperous little city of Osageville. It was Sunday. A corner loiterer directed me to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth's house.

A habitation of sequestered quiet ... as I stood before the door I heard the sunrise song of Rossini's _Wilhelm Tell_ ... a Red Seal record ...

accompanied by the slow, dreamy following of a piano's tinkle ... like harp sounds or remote, flowing water.

I halted, under a charm. I waited till the melody was at an end before I knocked. A small, pale-faced, pretty little woman answered.

"Does Mr. Jarvis Mackworth live here?"

"Yes. Come in. We have been expecting you. You are the poet, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am the poet."

"You're a good walker ... we didn't expect you before Monday or Tuesday.... Jarvis, here's the poet-boy from the university."

My host, unseen within, turned off another Red Seal record he had just started, again to the accompaniment of the piano.... Kreisler's _Caprice Viennoise_....