Within a week, the Royal progress had swept through parts of three of
our United States, without serious damage either to the lad or to the
landscape. The curve of operations was now fast shaping itself into a
circle. Day and night, the weather had been magically lovely. Royal had
gladly passed the first three nights _à la belle étoile_; with keen
relish, he rolled the phrase under his tongue, thinking that now not a
boy in Froggy Beaurivage’s French Literature classes understood its
charm as well as he. His Norfolk coat, a bore by day, proved a godsend
in the chill hours before dawn, and he knew the use of a Sunday paper as
a mattress. Before falling asleep, he would gaze with delight into the
skies; thrilled with their beauty and immensity, he would say to himself,
“After this, I am changed forever; I shall always be something more than
I was before I came here.” No doubt he was right.
And his days were no less wondrous, for their sun, and shade, and good
going. Sometimes, when he was beginning to feel dusty or weary, an
unexpected pool would signal to him from beside a shaded road; and when
he came up from it, he was a new-made creature. He liked being solitary,
yet he liked stopping at sudden inns for frugal meals, and he liked
chatting with the wayfarers he met. The latter half of the week had
moments less idyllic. His fourth night he spent in a box car, his fifth
in a boarding-house for Polish immigrants, and his sixth, in part at
least, in the jail-room of a village town-hall, where he had been held in
custody on a false charge of having stolen an automobile.
His code was very explicit as to stealing. He made a point of stealing
and begging nothing but rides of various sorts. He had begged and
received rides in hay-carts, touring-cars, lumber-trucks: he had also
managed to get without cost considerable railroad transportation. It
sounds crooked, to me! But of course each type of ride has its good
and bad points. He took whatever fruit he saw lying on the ground, on
the public side of fences; it was astonishing what excellent pickings
were to be had in this way; he felt that an essay on economics might be
written on this subject. But he never entered an orchard, never even
shook a wayside tree. His head was full of these delicate distinctions.
From Kipling he had imbibed the idea that the white man’s burden can
best be sustained in dark lands by the unfailing practice of wearing a
dinner jacket in the evening, no matter how solitary the meal. _Noblesse
oblige!_ And it keeps you from sinking. The idea had appealed to Royal,
and he had invented a variant of it to use in his travels. He would at
all times deal with the fruits of the earth exactly as if the owner of
them were watching him. No unheroic task! If he should fall once, he told
himself, it would be all the easier to fall again, and yet again; and
then where are you? As a matter of exact record, he did not fall once;
and I see no reason why this may not be set down to his credit. It is of
course regrettable that a principle which worked so well for agriculture
could not have been applied to transportation also.
Thus, by being partly prig, partly poet, partly his own stage-manager,
and altogether boy, Royal was taking steps toward being a man. There was
absolute truth in his protestations before the one-armed justice of the
peace (apparently the universal functionary of the village) that he knew
nothing of the stolen car, nothing whatever, from fender to tail-light.
Unluckily, on being asked his father’s name and address, he gave a wholly
fantastic reply, his brain being stuffed to capacity with material for
such purposes. I believe that he had a laudable idea of protecting the
family by “putting one over” on the village Dogberry. But by a lamentable
oversight, disclosed to the one-armed man on consulting directories and
maps, the county of Chesterfolk, in the adjoining State, acknowledged
no township called Four Bridges; and even had there been such a place,
it still remains doubtful whether Royal’s putative father, Algernon M.
Hollingsworth, that splendid creature born of necessity’s invention,
would ever have been content to live there. Other questions were put;
Royal’s _Whither_ was found to be fully as obscure as his _Whence_. He
was therefore clapped as a “suspicious vagrant” into the jail-room,
a high and narrow cubicle left over from the previous century, and
unused for years except for the occasional storing of the movie-man’s
impedimenta on wet evenings.
In lieu of a left hand, the one-armed justice of the peace had a steel
hook, which he managed with an address that Royal could but admire.
He carefully examined our poet’s possessions; his purse, food, poems,
matches, wristwatch, toothbrush, Iliad, flashlight. The purse, poems, and
food he regarded as negligible. The Iliad received from him both respect
and scorn; respect because it was print, scorn because it was print he
couldn’t read.
“Your Koran, ain’t it?” He asked the question with the irony he thought
due to those who gave false addresses. Royal trembled when hand and hook
turned those Homeric pages. His father’s bookplate might give the whole
show away. But fortunately that telltale emblem escaped the hook-and-eye
of justice. And the man’s idea of calling the book a Koran had in it
something that appealed strongly to the inventor’s own imagination; he
played upon the theme with alliterative variations.
“Kid carries Koran,” he ejaculated while pulling out a rickety settee for
the repose of the accused. Hooking up Royal’s flashlight, he discovered
a tattered blanket belonging to the movie-man, and this he threw over
the settee, still improvising. “Koran concealed on Courteous Kid.”
Perhaps that fancy of his softened his fibre. He had pocketed Royal’s
matches, and was about to confiscate his flashlight also, when a humane
thought occurred to him. For our humor may at times produce humanity in
ourselves, if not in those whom we expose to it.
“Well, kid, I guess I’ll leave you your light to read your Koran by.
Sorry we can’t give you a prayer-rug too, but our finest Orientals are
in storage, this season.” (He’d show the young fella ’t givin’ false
addresses was a game two could play at!) Royal was relieved when at last
the justice really locked the door, and departed. Something to tell old
Peter, this.
He wondered what Peter, the practical genius, would do in that
ill-smelling hole. Peter, he concluded, would explore things. Royal’s
flashlight revealed two flimsy packing-cases; the movie-man was his
Providence, that night. He waited until midnight, by his watch. He then
set one box on the other, and by cautious climbing, managed to reach the
tiny barred window, high in the wall. The bars were ancient in their
shallow sockets; Royal was lean, even leaner than usual; in a twinkling
he had leaped down crashing into some mournful sumac trees, and after
that, escape was easy, along the adjoining church and churchyard. Surely
the leprecauns were on his side! All of a sudden he realized that his act
of self-preservation from so-called justice was one of the most practical
bits of work he had ever performed in his life. He had a momentary gleam
of shame for his impractical, un-Peter-like past, and even gave a thought
to his father, in his hot city studio, working for the wherewithal. But
that mood soon passed. The ecstasy of escape from the troubles he had
brought on himself gave him wings. Until nearly dawn, he swept straight
ahead, under a favoring moon. He was composing a Sonnet to Some Sumacs.
“A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms,
And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—
A wonderful beginning! It would require some fine work with _charms_,
_harms_, _alarms_; with _fears_, _cheers_, _reveres_. But Royal was
perfectly happy; and no one can say that his inspiration was not
authentic.
Not twenty miles from his own home with its bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, he
saw a belated or else be-earlied furniture-van approaching from a wooded
road that met the highway. Its driver, so Royal judged as a bearded face
emerged out of the morning mist, was one of those how-could-I-help-it
persons who are always a little late or a little early, a type toward
which he felt drawn. He waited there, at the heart of the crossroads.
The man hailed him, and Royal, in his character-part of young man out of
work, accepted the proffered lift, and ate heartily of the rude liberal
bread and cheese that tasted of the leather seat. They chatted at ease
of brakes, tires, clutches, and children, as they rode quietly into the
morning. Royal contributed most of the listening; he was quite as much at
home among elderly workers for a living as with frivolous persons of his
own age.
When they reached Falmouth Junction, a railway centre of note, their ways
diverged. At the station, Royal bought coffee, sandwiches, and fruit,
all of which he shared with the man; and the man gave him two black
cigars at parting. Royal liked that furniture-fellow. He considered that
when compared with the one-armed miscarrier of justice, the man had the
makings of an excellent leprecaun in him; his beard sticking out of the
mist was just like a leprecaun’s. But although the man, in his dreamy
behindhand (or else beforehand) way, had confided much to Royal, with a
wealth of detail as to his youngest child, “cutest kid of the bunch, and
a reg’lar Dannle Webster with his spellin’-book,” our traveller did not
in return open his heart about his escape from the jail-room. For a long
time after that incident, Royal was inclined to suspect both justice and
peace in quarters where they were least intended. Falmouth town boasts a
traffic policeman; Royal, on spying those bright buttons, took swiftly to
the road again.
And now, on the last stretch of his wander-week, he bethought himself
of the soldier grave on that little hill, scarcely an hour’s walk from
the very end of his appointed round. He loved the place; he felt drowsy,
in spite of the railway coffee and the fresh morning air, and he wanted
to lie down and sleep for a pleasant hour under those pines, his head
pillowed on heroic ashes. He phrased it thus to himself, although he knew
that he would probably find a better resting-place on the warm ground
somewhat removed from the grave. After a good little snatch of sleep,
there would be time for a few last touches on the Amaryllis poem, and
then, home. The Sumac Sonnet could wait. After all, a beefsteak luncheon
has its merits.
Royal was more tired than he knew. His pleasant hour of sleep multiplied
itself by two, by three, by four. He woke with a start to find that the
day was no longer young. He would have to step lively if he hoped to
reach home by tea-time; scones, fresh from the oven! But he had just had
a very marvellous dream, and surely, before the glamour of it should
vanish, he owed it to the world to put some breath of it into his poem.
Enthralled by his verses, the poet resented the approach of that other
traveller, just puffing up over the western slope of the little hill.
The man was forty-five or fifty or even sixty, the boy guessed; oh,
ever so old! He was soiled, obese, crumpled, out of breath; he needed a
shave. Limp gray hairs straggled behind his plaided cap. His profile
was fattened, yet highly predacious. But his tweeds seemed rather better
in quality than Royal’s, his shoes no worse. Royal’s bookish theory that
you can always tell at a glance whether a man is a gentleman or not fell
to pieces under that fugitive’s weary, wary eye. Certainly no poet, our
sumac sonneteer decided. Villon never looked quite like that, nor Poe,
nor Vachel Lindsay.