Tramping on Life Part 91

"They haven't so far, have they?"

"But what in the world are you going back to Kansas for?"

"Because I have them trained there to accept me. I can do pretty much as I choose at the university. But mainly I want to write my four-act play in earnest--my New Testament drama, _Judas_. And I know of no better place to go to."

"Good-bye, and don't fail to pay me a visit in the spring."

"I will ... for a few weeks ... on my way to Paris."

"Paris? How are you going to get there?"

"I'll take a few cars of cattle east to New York from the Kansas City stock yards ... and I'll work my way across on a cattle boat."

"Good-bye! I wish I had your initiative!"

"Good-bye! Mrs. Baxter ... glad to have met you!"

"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory," and she dropped my hand quickly and turned on her heel, walking away with easy grace. I admired the back of her legs as she disappeared into her tent.

"Good-bye, Dan!"

"Good-bye, Buzzer!"

"Daniel," called Mrs. Baxter from the interior of her tent, "you mustn't call Mr. Gregory that!"

At Laurel again, I found it still a month before fall session. All summer I had lacked my nude sunbaths to which I had become accustomed.

So again I sought my island.

I rented my room over the tinshop again, and was soon in the thick of the fall term. By this time I had my contemporaries on the hill very much puzzled.

Henry Belton, the Single Tax millionaire, had come to Kansas City. He was so diminutive as to be doll-like. He had to stand on a box to be seen, when he spoke from the floor, at the banquet tendered him ... and I had gone in to Kansas City as his guest, and had been seated on his right hand--I, in my painfully shabby clothes.

The professors and students could not see why I made such a stir with prominent people, how I held their friends.h.i.+p despite my eccentricities and deep poverty.

"I can't help you any more," observed Belton to me, as we sat in the lobby of the Coates House where he was putting up.

"Who the h.e.l.l's asking you to help me?" I replied. "I came down from Laurel with no ulterior motive; I came just to pay you a visit, and to thank you personally for giving me six months of freedom from economic worry while I wrote my fairy drama ... anyhow, please remember that it wasn't me you helped, but Poetry!"

"It's too bad you can't be a Single Taxer," he sighed. "I like you, Gregory, and I'd put you on my pension list if you'd only s.h.i.+ft some of your fanaticism for poetry to the Single Tax cause."

Since then I have been frankly sorry that I did not play the hypocrite to Belton, in order to be put on a pension for several years. I might have achieved great verse during the leisure so afforded for calm, creative work.

I started a poetry club on the Hill.... I determined that it should be anarchistic in principle ... we should have no officials ... no dues ...

not even a secretary to read dull minutes of previous meetings ... we should take turns presiding as chairman. And the members.h.i.+p was to be divided equally with girls.

But the school year had begun unhappily for me. I did not find Vanna there. I went to visit her homely roommate.

"Vanna has gone off to Arkansas ... she is teaching school down there for the winter."

"Thank G.o.d she's not married somebody!" I cried, forgetting, and giving myself away. Then Vanna Andrews' roommate saw at last that it was not she I was interested in. She gave way to invective.

"You! a worthless tramp like you! A crazy fool!... to dare even hope that Vanna Andrews would ever love _you_!" In a torrent of tears she asked me never to speak to her again.

I was sorry I had not procured Vanna's address before I had betrayed myself. But, anyhow, I wrote her a long letter and sent it in care of the university registrar.

Flamboyantly I confessed my love ... rehea.r.s.ed the story of my wors.h.i.+p of her from afar....

For a month, every day, I sent her a bulky envelope full of mad verse and declarations of undying love. As the letters were not being returned, she must be receiving them.

One morning, with trembling hands and a pounding heart that nearly bore me down, it acted so like a battering ram on the inside, I drew a delicately scented envelope from my mailbox ... addressed in a dainty hand.

I kissed the letter again and again before I tore it open ... it was well that I did it then. I would not have kissed it afterward.

It was filled with stinging rebuke for my presumption ... if I had a shred of the gentleman in me I would cease troubling her.... I had caused her exceeding annoyance by my deluge and torrent of absurd letters ... she did not care for me ... she thought my poetry was bad ... and why had I behaved so brutally toward her former roommate?...

I saw that the homely girl had not been remiss in writing to Vanna about me....

My reply was a very poetic letter.

"I will trouble you no more," I ended; "but do not destroy my letters and poems, for, long after your wonderful beauty has become a mere handful of oblivious dust blowing about the stones of the world, you will be famous because a great poet loved you ... a poet whom you unwisely and ignorantly scorned."

Dr. Van Maarden, the Dutch psychiatrist and playwright, author of _De Kleine Man_, was to come to Laurel to deliver his celebrated lectures on "The Socialisation of Humanity."...

Professor Dineen, a flabby, feminine little fellow, one of our professors of philosophy, and hated by the dean of his department because he was a real philosopher, despite his physical ludicrousness,--and had published a book which the critics were hailing as a real contribution to the world of thought--

Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to Laurel....

"For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic ways of our crude pioneers...."

"Van Maarden is a remarkable man," continued Dineen; "he writes plays, poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is practically stranded here in America.

"It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas, carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former days."

Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very boy in his enthusiasm. He advanced many doctrines at variance with even the political radicalism of Kansas.

But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was accepted gravely, and ideas won consideration, enunciated by him, that would have been looked on as mad, coming from me....

Again the faculty were nonplussed ... puzzled....