power of money? why, contempt of money--and set off without a dime to
see America and live, and how the good God took care of him until he
got to California. “In that way I learned to respect myself and to
respect my fellow-man,” said he. “I learned what a lot of good poor
men and women there are in America. And I have nothing to complain
of individuals as such. I could always rely on brotherliness. But it
was different with institutions, when I went to people who were not
themselves but hirelings, people hired to do good. Don’t I know the
minions of charity? What are the places where as a tramp I’ve had the
stingiest treatment in the world? Why, in institutions from the paid
organisers of charity.” And he told of how he once went to a Y at
H----, Mo., and the fight he had to get mere soap and towel and a bath.
“By Gosh, they weren’t going to give it to me. I said ‘I’ve been a
Y.M.C.A. worker myself in New York for years and I know that soap and
towel can be had. I know the whole workings of the organisation and
I’ll have soap and towel from you if I have to bring the roof down.
I’ll go to the editors of the newspapers. I’ll go to the leading
ministers and preachers of H---- and I’ll hold you up to shame to the
town. I’ll whale you.’ And I got soap and towel and they said, ‘take
him down,’ and I got a bath, though I used as much energy to get it
from them as would have served to do three days’ hard work. Now I know
that if I had gone into any working man’s home in town and asked for
it, or even into a hotel I’d have got soap and towel without demur.
“Yet my best friend says, ‘Vachel, you’re morbid on the subject of
money.’ I said to him ‘Well, there’s a lot in the New Testament about
it. Look it up!’”
[Illustration]
_The gopher-rats are sitting on their tails
Watching us all around, listening to us.
What is it these queer birds are getting excited about
By their camp fire?
Money, is it? Money’s no good to the gophers,
Leave us a crumb or two.
Don’t forget a spot of that fried hash:
Squeak!_
[Illustration: WE CLIMBED UP WITH THE TREES
BUT CAME DOWN WITH THE WATERS]
XXI. DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN
VACHEL told me once, to save his self-respect, he took a job in Chicago
in a department store at seven dollars a week, and was employed in
the wholesale toy department; a whole block of toys, where was to
be found every imaginable plaything for young and old, from dolls
as large as three-year-old children to family portrait albums that,
having a musical box in their binding, played “The Old Folks at Home”
and various hymn-tunes when you opened them. He told how a lad called
Timmins wound up all the albums he could lay his hands on, and laid
them open and went away to another part of the building, and of the
wild din that ensued.
Timmins was “fired.”
He told how he lived amid acres of dolls and how, to satisfy the fire
insurance inspectors, a three-foot clearance was made between the top
of the toy heaps and the roof, and how all one night they did overtime
slamming down rows and sections of dolls and toys on to waiting trucks,
and they were rushed to another place. Then the inspectors came and
passed the building. And when they were gone the Ghetto came and bought
the “bum dolls” from the “smash dump,” and Vachel and the rest were
soon building toys up to the roof once more.
* * * * *
“BUT none of my friends liked my earning my living in this way. They’d
prefer to see me in a bank or an insurance office. You see, I could not
paint a picture that would keep me. I would not enter commercial art--I
mean advertisement drawing. My poems did not sell, and people thought
I had spent long enough studying and loafing, and that I ought to begin
to earn a decent living. So I went into the Chicago Department Store.
They did not like that. So I took to the road again. Curiously enough,
Francis Hackett took a job in that same store before his star arose.”
Vachel and I had a great pow-wow by night and morning fire, and I
cannot set down half here in these (I hope) dignified paragraphs. But
all the while we sat and talked, the prairie rats sat about us on their
tails and haunches, and stared curiously with their forepaws on their
chests like good masons in their rituals. They smelt the beans, they
smelt the cheese, they smelt the corn-beef hash; they knew they were
protected by the United States Government and they had never seen a dog
or a cat. Curiously friendly little companions!
After the cloudy night there was a serene morning. When the veils were
lifted off the mountains we knew them for just what they were. They did
not go all the way to the sky after all.
We went down Cataract Mountain the same way as the water, down to
flower-spread meads and spacious fir-woods and widening streams.
Up above us the water chariots came racing behind white horses four
abreast, five abreast, natural fountains played on every hand, and
high as heaven itself tiny cataracts tipped over and fell downwards
into veils, into smoke, into nothingness. Characteristic of the place
were the great volumes of water which plunged under hollow snow-crusts
to emerge forty feet lower down after a momentary vigil in the snow.
This is the valley of Cataract Creek, bounded by lofty and perhaps
impassable rocks, but in itself a garden to the last patch of mould and
the last bright flower.
* * * * *
WE made our way along Haystack Butte toward Mount Grinnell, which, like
a mighty fortress, stood facing us in the line of our tramp. Was it the
beauty of the garden or was it the limpidity of the streams that set
us talking of England? It is a peculiarly happy subject with the poet,
who, with all his Americanism, has a true reverence for the fountain
of English. This July, just before setting out for the Rockies, he
received an invitation from Robert Bridges, the British poet laureate,
to become a member of the “Society for Pure English.” To that extent
has Oxford at least recognised that Vachel Lindsay is no mere performer
or charlatan and not the “jazz-poet.” To some people in England Vachel
came as a prophet, and his courtly and, indeed, stately manners,
the profound obeisance which he made with his hat before entering a
church or a school or a house, revealed him as an American of the
Washingtonian cast.
Some would-be cynical, smart undergraduate was showing Vachel King’s
College Chapel at Cambridge, and said to him: “The last American we
showed round when we asked him what he thought of it, said, ‘Some
God-box.’” And he seemed to think that very amusing, and could not
understand Lindsay’s silence on the point.
“He did not know for how many years I had lectured on the Gothic and
what it meant to me,” said Vachel.
Naturally, I chaffed my companion not a little on his belonging to
the S.P.E., and called him to order whenever the arduousness of our
campaign prompted him to break across the pure classic of Shakespeare’s
tongue, and I made him take note of many expressions, such as “being
wished on,” and “handing a man the canned goods,” which I bade him
chase from America into the sea.
“I should only be too glad, Stephen,” said he, “if I could get rid
of ‘motivate’ and a man’s ‘implications’ and ‘the last analysis’ and
‘the twilight zone’ and ‘canned metaphor’ and the dollar adjectives, a
‘ten-million-dollar building’ and a ‘million-dollar bride.’”
[Illustration]
_Oxford has asked Chicago
To lend its purifying aid
To the King’s English.
O Oxford! O Bridges!_
[Illustration: THE INVISIBLE PLAYMATE JOINS US]
XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”
“NOW, Horace Greeley----” said Vachel, opening his “morning strafe” of
political conversation.
“Who the ---- was he?”
“You don’t know? Why, you’ll be saying you don’t know Shakespeare next.
That’s as if J. C. Squire had never heard of Edwin Booth.”
“Well, who was he?”
“He edited the _Tribune_ throughout the Civil War.”
“That all?”
“He said, ‘The way to resume is to resume.’”
“That all?”
“He said, ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,’ and
printed it at the head of his newspaper every day.”
“Oh! Did you ever hear of Mudford?”
“No.”
“What, never heard of Mudford, the famous editor of the _Standard_?”
“No.”
“Ever heard of Nicol Dunn?”
“No.”
“He edited the _Morning Post_ in its better days. Ever heard of
Frederick Greenwood?”
“No.”
“Never heard of Frederick Greenwood? Why, he was the greatest
journalist England ever produced. He inspired Disraeli with the idea of
buying the Suez Canal. If we don’t know about your journalists, I see
you don’t know about ours.”
The battery was silenced.
* * * * *
WE walked through five miles of rotten-ripe red raspberries and
got thorns in our half-naked knees and carmined our fingers with
raspberry juice, and we kept spitting out unpalatable fruits and making
uncomplimentary remarks. Then we got to open pine woods and freed our
feet of the tangles, and Vachel began to sing softly to himself a
children’s processional hymn:
We are the Magi,
Children though we are.
We are the wise men,
Following the star.
“There are only two of us.” I ventured. “Where do you think the third
king has got to?”
“That’s King Christopher,” said Vachel, sadly. “That’s our ‘other wise
man.’ He is with us, but he’s invisible. He is sitting in Greeley
Square or Vesey Street, and it was thinking of him that really started
me on Horace Greeley.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he said to all the young Magi, ‘quit seeking a star in the East,
Go West and grow up with the country. Get into America; find your
spiritual roots.’”
“You want to persuade every one to cross the Appalachians?”
“Yes,” said Vachel dreamily. “So I brought him along invisibly. He is
our invisible playmate.” And he resumed his children’s hymn.
“You’re a good bit like Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling,” said Vachel to
me at last, “You’ve a wonderful geographical background. You ought to
read the life of Mark Twain. Very interesting. He was made by his life
in Nevada. His life in the silver mining camps and his knowledge of the
West and the South made him. Read _Roughing It_. It’s a great book.
Then Kipling with a boyhood in India and a maturity in America owes
much to his knowing both West and East. What’s the matter with young
men to-day is a disinclination to get their feet dirty. You’re the only
man in England or America I’ve been able to persuade to go on a tramp
with me. When I proposed it to M----, the English poet, he seemed to
turn pale. That’s all behind me,” he said, “though I don’t know what he
meant.”
* * * * *
WE came within sight of the shore of Lake Josephine. “Shall we ask our
invisible companion if he’d like to come in for a swim with us?” said
I.
“Why, that would be fine.”
So we broke through to the green and silver lake and, putting our
tender feet on the sharp stones and water-covered boulders, waded out
to swimming depth and we made a great splash with Napoleon’s beautiful
bride. And when we came we vagabondised on the shore for the rest of
the day--the three of us--lying stretched out beside a mounting red
blaze of rain-washed wood.
The beach was all of little mauve stones which we raked into couches.
And there we lay munching hot pea-nuts and rebuilding the world on a
foundation of the American Wild West. Vachel drew some more world-maps
and adopted our invisible playmate as a member of the society of
“astrological geographers,” and we took for our emblem and device the
map of the two hemispheres with the motto, “The World is My Parish.”
What a serene evening it was by the side of fair Josephine! A half
moon rose over us at nightfall and marsh hens sped through the air
in volleying groups of wings. The stars and the moon threw a silver
radiance on the line of the mountain-tops and on the forests and on
the dimples and lines and circles of the lake. We fell asleep and were
warm and at peace. We only waked at four in the morning and then bathed
before sunrise and mingled our bodies with the perfect reflections of
green and grey and brown and snowy mountain-sides.
The sun arising grew upon us and chased wraith-like mists across the
waters, and our fire, hotter than the sun, blazed on the mauve stones
and baked us and dried us when we came out to it, and gave us our
coffee and gave us all we needed till old Sol was radiant o’er the
scene.
[Illustration]
_We know about Josephine
What Napoleon did not know.
He was too preoccupied sacking cities
To love the beautiful altogether,
Killing men, counting cannon, putting unneeded
Crowns upon his brothers’ heads.
He didn’t know much about her,
O no!
He said there were no more Alps,
No more Pyrenees.
He never said there were no more Rocky Mountains._
[Illustration: THE CHRISTIAN BECOMES SUN-WORSHIPPER ALSO]
XXIII. THE SUN-WORSHIPPER
“I DRINK to America as she was before 1492,” said Vachel, lifting high
his coffee cup.
“I drink to her as she was before the Red Man came.”
“And I drink to her as she was before the Mound-builders came----”
“And I drink to her as she was in the days of the mountain-top tribe
when a man and his family lived together on a mountain-top and the
rule was one peak to one family, and the eagles were tame and carried
the mail.”
“And I drink to Noah’s fourth son, who was so naughty he was not
allowed to bring a wife into the Ark but carried a pine branch under
his arm. Is there any more booze i’ the can? Yea. Very well; I drink
again to Noah’s outcast son who wandered in these parts before the
mountain-tribe arrived.”
“Is there any more of this most excellent coffee?”
“There is, dear Stephen, one last kick in the bottom of the pot.”
“Then I drink to the Lady of the Lake whom Noah’s son was obliged to
marry and to the cut-throat trout that were their offspring----”
“Enough, enough! Is there any more booze?”
“Not a suck, Sir.”
“Alas!”
* * * * *
THE reader will perhaps surmise that we are approaching the Canadian
line and that my anti-saloon companion has fallen for what they make in
Alberta.
But no, we have been made drunk with words; it often occurs, and with
Lindsay’s stone coffee. The stone in the mosquito-net coffee bag has
spoken through us. It is a piece of the Rocky Mountains, and they
know all there is to know about the mysterious mound-builders and
mountain-tribes. How gauntly and savagely these old mountains have
looked on at no-humanity and for how many thousands of years! “What
went ye out for to see?” said Vachel presently when we had hitched
on our packs. “Not a reed shaken by the wind! What went we out into
Glacier Wilderness for to see? Why, _man_, a prophet. And there’s a
prophet in these mountains who can tell us a good deal about the old
world. We ought to settle many things about the world before I get back
to Springfield and you get back to London. Everywhere you have been I’m
going to assume I’ve been also. Now, at our next sitting let us drink
to Russia--Russia as she was before the Bolsheviks.”
“As she was before Peter the Great,” I added.
“As she was before the hordes.”
The subject was too dark after all. I felt we should have to drink,
not to the past, but to the Russia that is going to be when the
Bolsheviks have been forgotten.
“And England?” I asked. “Will you not drink confusion to the enemies of
King George V.?”
* * * * *
“OH, no,” said the poet. “I’m too good an American for that. Couldn’t
do that. My roots are too deep in democracy. Confusion to the enemies
of King George--no, couldn’t drink it. Confusion to the enemies of the
English people. Yes, I’d drink that toast.”
“Well, it’s the same thing.”
“Doesn’t sound so.”
“In that case,” I retorted, “I’ll not drink to the President.”
But Vachel had become preoccupied and began an unending chant of
Patrick Henry’s oration,
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet,
As to be purchased by chains and slavery--
I don’t care for others, but as for myself
Give me liberty or give me death!
No doubt he did not quote it quite correctly, but I fastened
on the third line, which I repeated deliberately after him,
“I--do--not--care--for--others,” until he was once more moved to mirth
and got down from what in one poem he has called:
The old Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist soap-box;
The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box;
The Karl Marx, Henry George, and Woodrow Wilson soap-box.
And we washed off our politics from our minds at high noon in a river.
And Vachel sat astride of a giant tree that had fallen across the
stream, and luxuriating in the heat he cried out to me, “Gosh, Stephen,
I’m a sun-worshipper with my shirt off!”
[Illustration]
_Quit drinking coffee
Before it’s everlastingly too late;
Be not found among the coffee-bibbers!
Silence those profane toasts
To Noah’s offspring and Patrick Henry.
Oh, Uncle Sam,
See how thy children go
To the devil--drinking coffee!
O prohibit it!_
[Illustration: THE BIRD CATCHETH THE EAR OF THE PRIMITIVE MAN]
XXIV. TWO VOICES
MY companion has two voices: one is that of a politician, harsh and
strident, the other is that of a Homeric harper and ballad-chanter of
the days of old. The political voice does not please me much. It is
the voice of the “hell-roarer” of the prairies. Lindsay loves a mighty
shout, an exultant war-whoop for its own sake, like any Indian. And ...
I’ve heard those “glacier boulders across the prairies rolled.” I have
heard the “gigantic troubadour speaking like a siege-gun.” But there is
another voice--
Two voices:
One was of the deep,
The other of a poor old silly sheep.
And ... both were thine!
as G. W. Steevens once wrote. The other voice is truly of the deep;
sonorous and golden, murmuring, and with eternity dreaming in it. That
is the voice of the poet.
Some days with us were naturally dedicated to poetry. The steps on the
mountains caught the rhythms, the gliding waterfalls and the intensely
coloured listening flowers suggested the mood of the poets, and then
the peaks, the grandeur, uplifted Lindsay’s spirit. The hymns were
silenced. Silence hung on the mute figures of Bryan and Altgelt. We let
Roosevelt sleep on. American and European civilisation ceased to fill
the mind, and there was only the mountains and poetry. Vachel knew by
heart whole books, and he crooned and chanted as we walked, and lifted
his head up to the snows and the waterfalls and the skies. He has a
bird-like face when he recites; his eyes almost close, his lips purse
up and open like a thrush’s beak. He glories in the word of poesy, and
entirely forgets himself--
Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamàkura.
he chanted over and over again like a prayer, as if those hushed and
holy mountains on which we looked were Buddha, Buddha at Kamàkura. And
then--
To him the Way, the Law, Apart
Whom Maya held beneath her heart,
Ananda’s Lord--the Bodhisat.
For whoso will, from Pride released
Contemning neither man nor beast,
May hear the Soul of all the East
About him at Kamàkura.
Yea, voice of every Soul that clung
To Life that strove from rung to rung,
When Devadatta’s rule was young,
The warm wind brings Kamàkura.
My eyes had no doubt often passed over these lines without realising
their beauty. The printing of a poem is only a guide, a clue to what
the poem really is. It is not the poem itself. You have to divine the
inner mystery and beauty. The man who can read a poem may help you to
divine it for yourself. And this Lindsay did, making this poem live as
we walked about--about and about. The beauty of the poem almost depends
on pronouncing the word Kamàkura aright. Because we both loved this
song we thought of naming some snowy mountain after Buddha, with the
great plea--“Be gentle!” Be gentle, all of us!
Another poem which became a possession of the heart was that of Sydney
Lanier, little-known in England--
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies,
In the freedom that fills all space ’twixt the marsh and the skies
By so many roots as the marsh-hen sends to the sod,
I will heartily lay me ahold of the greatness of God.
Like the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
This poet of southern Georgia gave, I thought, voice to a part
of America, and it was a part I had tramped in too, a land of
moss-hung forests and marshes, of marsh-blossoms and many birds.
In that beautiful first verse how the word “secretly” in the first
line enchants the ear, and then the wonderful effect of the phrase
“greatness of God” when taken with wing-flight of birds rising o’er the
reeds!
Talking of the modern poets, we agreed that a poem was little if there
was not sound in it--melody--resonance. We found a common fellowship in
Poe, and my companion rolled forth under a low and threatening heaven
the cadences of “Ulalume,” his favourite poem, he averred.
Browning meant nothing to him, but he was fond of some of the early
poems of Tennyson, especially of “Maud,” which greatly inspired him.
Curiously enough, the latter poems of Tennyson were unknown to him--
On a midnight in mid-winter when all but the winds were dead,
“The meek shall inherit the earth” was a Scripture which ran through
his head,
and the kindred poems among the last pages of the collected works of
Tennyson.
Matthew Arnold had never touched him, but the music of Keats he
understood naturally at sight. Of his own American poets he did not
care for Whitman, whom he is so often told he resembles, but he loved
Longfellow and all such word-music as--
Sandalphon the angel of glory,
Sandalphon the angel of prayer,
all of which he said one day as we were climbing among the rocks.
He began loving poetry by learning it by heart and reciting it for his
own joy, and I began by writing in an exercise-book all the soldiers’
poems of Thomas Campbell and reading them--“a thousand times o’er”--
My little one kissed me a thousand times o’er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart.
“Stay, stay with us! rest! thou art weary and worn,”
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear--melted away!
How precious are the recollections of one’s first love of poetry! If as
a boy you read the “Golden Legend” walking in country lanes when the
hay was cut in swathes in the fields on either hand; if you have ever
lain in the midst of a cornfield and crooned to yourself the exultant
promises of Rabbi ben Ezra, or climbed mountains with “Marmion” in
your heart, or lisped the “Ode to a Nightingale” to the first girl you
loved, how touching it will always be in memory!
The poet and the tramp shared thus their recollections as they wandered
amidst heights and depths. They surely know much more of one another
now!
_I think the poet
Learned to be a poet,
By living with the poets
Till he became a poet._
_He had the great need in him
To give a song a tune.
So he listened how the birds sang
And he began to croon._
_Now he’s singing for a living
And living for his singing.
And his companion’s singing,
And all of us are singing,
Because he’s learned to sing._
[Illustration: THE CLOUDS CAME OUT OF THEIR HOMES TO SEE US]
XXV. STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS
WE scrambled through thickets to Mount Grinnell, which stands like
a gigantic fortress, a bulwark of this world against others. Its
impregnability seemed appalling. Fancy knocking at that door after it
was shut! We stopped and looked up at it, and the sight of it relaxed
our tense human energy and left us with very contrite souls. However,
the nearer we got to it the less it was magnified. Its battlements
receded and we soon had a fly’s view of the mountain, the view which
the fly has when it is walking on the barren surface of the rock.
We clawed our way along the steep entangled shore of Lake Grinnell to a
waste of willow saplings, and a litter of postal packets of great rocks
delivered by the mail chute of the Grinnell Cataract. Here a great mass
of water meets momentarily with calamity and falls over a precipice
like houses falling. At two miles’ distance it is like a picture of
a waterfall seen in a shop window, pretty and attractive. At twenty
yards’ distance it is the awful thing it is. The sun is hidden at noon
and a noise that drowns all other noises is in your ears. The spray
blows turbulently over you like rain.
We had thought to cross the cataract through the _disjecta membra_
of the rocks at its base, and climbed into dreadful proximity, and
advanced our noses inquisitively over the foam. And then very hurriedly
we drew back as if we feared we should be tempted across it. But what
to do? Not surely to retrace our steps? That seemed unthinkable.