Tramping on Life Part 86

"And so it was that Roosevelt expressed himself freely ... and at the same time protected himself."

We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it had been a hard climb.

At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State.

The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us.

"G.o.d, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it."

"Walt Mason?" I enquired, mischievously....

"No," he responded, seriously, "Walt Whitman."

"But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-G.o.d stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide, scenic vistas....

"Nevertheless," I went on, "Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we have Carrie Nation--"

"And Johnnie Gregory!" put in Baxter.

"I don't want just to belong to Kansas."

It was I who was humourless now, "I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois ideals ... I want to belong to the world--as--you do!"

We trudged back to town.

"What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!"

My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke.

I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making ... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered themselves slighted.

When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our first names.

"Good-bye, Johnnie!"

"Good-bye, Penton!"

"Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so conveniently."

I a.s.sured him that I would not fail.

For I had spoken with him of my determination to s.h.i.+p on the Great Lakes for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_.

"My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry already."

The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one, and I had not followed even that closely.

"If you'll graduate," Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the Kansas fas.h.i.+on, "I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't believe in you, and, frankly,--say it was a mistake ever to have let you in."

Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.

"In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a detriment to the school."

"And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?"

"Yes, G.o.d pity me, I did," he jested. "I remembered how I was asked to quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were cla.s.smates....

"I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!...

but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus ... it might make them more alive and interesting."

Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I sold to _Everybody's_ kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month.

I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.

There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off before her, at the same time.

The Copperwell Street Show came to town. They lined the main street with booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them except at peril of his life. A gold medal was offered to anyone who would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience from the inside of the cage.

I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal's equivalent in money. I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.

I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....

"JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE ------------------------ KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,"

Jack Travers was at his facetious best.

Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia Britannica....

People looked at me both with amus.e.m.e.nt and admiring amazement as they saw me about, late that afternoon....

"Now tell me the honest truth about the lions," I asked of the trainer.

"They're a pretty bad lot."

"Come on. I've made up my mind to go in, and I'm not afraid."

"--though lions are not as bad as leopards and tigers ... there's no telling when they might jump you ... there's only one chance in a thousand that they will ... but you may bring one up from being a cub ... and, one morning, because of something you can't read in its animal mind--it not liking its breakfast or something--it may jump you, give one crunch, and snuff you out like a candle ... it's that chance that you take that makes it seem brave."

"Thanks, I'll take the chance."

"Are you sure you'll have enough command of yourself to make a speech?"

"--Certain ... I've committed to memory almost all the Encyclopedia Britannica article on lions ... I'm going to give them that...."