Tramping on Life Part 70

Jarvis Alexander Mackworth came forth like a leisurely duck, waddling.

He was very, very fat. He extended me a plump, white hand ... a slack hand-shake ... but not an unhearty one, rather a grip of easy welcome.

A kind, rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Sh.e.l.ley's father, plump and methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, s.h.i.+ning ecstasy of Sh.e.l.ley's countenance itself--you would have had Mackworth's face before its time. I never beheld such spirituality in a fat man. His stoutness was not unpleasing.

"My boy ... come in ... my G.o.d, you're all wet ... you look frail, too."

A pity shone in his eyes. "Minnie, call up Ally Merton ..." turning to me, "I have, as you can see, no clothes to fit you ... but Ally might have ... he's about your size, but he carries a trifle more meat on his bones....

"Come in and dry yourself before the fire till he gets over."

We sat before the gas-fire of artificial logs.

"Minnie, will you make a cup of tea for this--poor boy," and he lowered his voice at the last two words, realising that I was hearing, too.

"Yes, Jarv!"

I sat at the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in accompaniment with the records ... it was Caruso now....

"A glorious voice, isn't it, young man?" Mackworth asked, as I ate voraciously of the cold roast set before me ... of the delicious white bread and fresh dairy b.u.t.ter, just from the churn of some neighbouring farmer.

"I know nothing much about music," he continued, "--just appreciate it ... --seems to me that's what we need now, more than anything else ...

appreciation of the arts.... I like to sit here and pick out the melodies on the piano as the tune runs on. It inspires me. The precious people, the aesthetic upstarts, make fun of Edison and his 'canned music,' as they call it ... but I say Edison is one of the great forces for culture in America to-day. Everybody can't go to New York, London, Paris, Bayreuth ... not to Chicago even....

"Beauty must come to Osageville, since Osageville cannot come to Beauty."

I was charmed.

"Mr. Mackworth, you are a great man," I said.

A ring at the bell. Ally Merton....

"Ally, this is Mr. John Gregory, poet at large, Villon of American Literature ... let us hope, some day a little more of the Whittier ...

Ally--" and the speaker turned to me, "Ally Merton is my right hand man ... my best reporter...."

He took Merton aside, in private talk.... Ally looked me over with a keen, swift glance that appraised me from head to foot instantly ...

sharply but not hostilely ... as one who takes in a situation in a comprehensive instant.

"Yes, Mr. Mackworth, I can do it easily ... if they'll fit him."

There was an impersonality, however, about Merton's cryptic words that annoyed me.

"You are going home with Ally, John," Mackworth said to me, using my familiar name for the first time, "and borrow a suit of his clothes ...

and you are coming back with him to dinner ... where you'll meet a very famous person--Miss Clara Martin."

Ally's blue serge suit was too short in the legs and arms for me ...

otherwise it fitted. His gentleness and un.o.btrusive quietness entered into me, along with the putting on of his apparel. He led me upstairs in his house.

"Mr. Mackworth has asked me to put you up while you are in town ...

because his own house is full at present, otherwise he would accommodate you there ... I guess we can make s.h.i.+ft to entertain you properly.

"Here is the bathroom ... if you don't mind my saying it, when you throw the toilet seat up, let the water run from the tap over the wash basin ... my mother and sisters!" he trailed off in inaudible, deprecative urge of the proprieties.

Ally was anything but a small-town product. Suave, socially adroit, an instinctive creature of Good Form....

He came into the room he had given me to stay in. I looked like a different man, togged out in his clothes. Ally was surprised that I could wear his shoes ... he had such small feet ... I informed him proudly that I, too, had small feet....

"No, no, that is not the way to tie a tie ... let me show you ... you must make both ends meet exactly ... there, that's it!" and he stepped back, a look of satisfaction on his face ... he handed me a pearl stick pin.

"This is a loan, not a gift," he murmured.

I returned a quick, angry look.

"I don't want your pin."

"No offence meant," he deprecated, "and you must wear it" (for I was putting it aside) "Mr. Mackworth and I both want you to look your best when you meet Miss Martin at dinner to-night".... I angrily almost decided to take his pin with me when I left, just to fulfill his pre-supposition.

"No, that's not the place to stick it ... let me show you ... not in the body of the tie, but further down," and he deftly placed the pin in the right spot. Then he stepped back like an artist who is proud of having made a good job of bad materials....

"You look almost like a gentleman."

I was about to lick into Merton and lend him a sample of a few strong objurgations of road and jail, when I saw myself in the gla.s.s. I stood transfixed. He had not meant to be ironic. The transformation was startling....

"If you would only keep yourself tidy all the time that way!... it's easy."

"Not for me ... everything material that I touch seems to fall apart....

I lose my s.h.i.+rts inexplicably ... my socks ... holes appear overnight in my clothes. Books are the only things I can keep. I am always cluttered up with them."

"Appearances mean everything ... then, if you have the rest, the goods to deliver, there is no place a man might not go nor attain."

I looked the small town reporter over in surprise. I studied him closely for the first time. He belonged to the world, not to Osageville ... the world of fas.h.i.+on, of smartness ... a world I despised. My world and his would always be like separate planets. He would consort with people for the mere pleasure of social life with them. The one thing I did not like about him was his small mouth ... but then I did not like my own mouth ... it was large, sensual, loose and cruel.

And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing. But then my walk was a loose, bent-kneed method of progression....

Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains of industry, was dark and tall. She had been good-looking in girlhood.

She had fine eyes in a devastated face.

I found myself petted, mothered by her. As soon as she saw me she removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.

At supper I was told of a new project. A group of writers, especially of writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be called the _National Magazine_; for it was to be no less than that, a magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more impossible ideals of small business units--the ideal of a bourgeois commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last effort of the middle cla.s.ses to escape their surely destined strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.

I was a.s.sured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing American ideals and dreams was needed by them.... Ray Stannard Baker, Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....