would not be difficult. But I had attempted such crossings in the
Caucasus and knew what it meant to adventure one’s tender body into a
hypnotic, rushing current and a frantic roar of stones. So I went first
and demonstrated it.
And we did get across. With most of our clothes off and stuffed into
our packs, and with uprooted pine saplings for support, we made a
criss-cross diagonal course into the water, which rushed up our bodies
like wild mastiffs, and we were too preoccupied with the rolling stones
and slippery snags and the mesmerising onset of the waters to think
about the chilling we were getting. It was certainly a victory when we
slipped out of the central violence and got into the shallows on the
other side.
* * * * *
WE did no more that day. I had sprained two fingers anyway, and could
not rely on my left hand. So we piled a dead-willow fire beside the red
rocks and talked. The cliff above us went up to heaven, but there was
a recess washed out by the water of that waterfall in some past age.
I am inclined to think that the cataract made the wind which simply
raged round the corner all night long. But we had found a place that
was completely out of it. Also, we got enough wood to burn all night
and cure the cold. For it was cold up here. We built a long barrier of
little rocks between us and the elongated glowing furnace of willow
which we had made. This kept the flames off our blankets and yet warmed
our bodies all the way along.
It was a majestic night, with the screened light of the moon filling
a narrow sky. A selection of heaven’s stars played voluntaries to us,
but the jazz band of the waterfall kept up a grandiose hubbub, in which
were vocal human cries and groans and chatterings--as if it were hell
or Broadway going past.
Vachel could talk above this roar; I could not. So I listened to him
and his cataclysmic accompaniment. It was, I think, on the subject
of Turner and heroic painting. Vachel, and Ruskin before him were
attracted to Turner by the heroic style.
“Scenes such as this beside the waterfall delighted Turner. Just at
dusk it was a perfect Turner painting. Did you ever see that ‘elegant’
edition of Rogers’s _Italy_ which old Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin read with
their child? It is profusely illustrated with vignettes by Turner.
They are all in the heroic spirit and they started Ruskin on his
speculation about cloud-forms and in his idealistic interpretation of
Turner.”
“I love the heroic,” Vachel went on. “I hate the game of puncturing
heroics which people think so clever nowadays.”
I made no objection. A poet whose voice can be heard above the jazz
band is a hero, and my sympathies are not with the flood of the
burlesque--unless, as now, they begin to wrap my soul in slumber’s holy
balm.
* * * * *
NEXT day we went up to the clouds, climbing by tiny steps of rock and
slippery tussocks, and Vachel went ahead and became pioneer of the way.
For it was a left-handed mountain, and I had no left hand that I could
use, and I kept slipping five feet down in making one foot up. I got
left behind, and when I caught up with the poet he was sitting stripped
under a waterfall and leaning against a gleaming rock whilst the stream
splashed downward over him.
It was a day of great moving clouds. Clouds with personalities came
stalking out of chasm bed-chambers, clouds overtook us and enveloped
us. We found November’s home, where sweeping rains cross and recross
on the mountains. We passed near the base of the black and dirty
glacier and watched the clouds smoking over it like a spreading fire.
And presently there was not a particle of view above us except cloud,
and no view below except of the rocks at our feet and the cloud-filled
ravines.
We stood in perplexity. In clear weather it is difficult to get over
the “Garden Wall” from this side. Now we could not see our way any
further. We retired to twin slits in the cliff, stretched ourselves on
our blankets, and gave way to meditation.
[Illustration]
_The clouds came out of their homes to see us;
They had heard of us and had seen us from afar,
Now they could satisfy their curiosity
And find out just exactly who we were.
So they gave us of their hospitality,
Inviting us both to their mountain abode.
Mr. and Mrs. Glacier were at home--a chilly couple,
So were the impulsive avalanches, a family of long descent
And purest origin.
The visitors were mostly ladies of the upper strata of society
Most æsthetically gowned.
They came about us, asked us various questions,
Conventional questions about the weather.
Some new ones came, others drifted away.
We were left by ourselves at the last.
The clouds didn’t altogether like our style,
Our form wasn’t theirs,
We were obviously parvenus, Nature’s profiteers,
Living not on our income but by our output.
The Peaks, their husbands, with their patrimonies,
Were certainly less clever and more stodgy,
But we were clear outsiders, people of a lowly birth,
Not altogether possible, they judged.
So the clouds’ curiosity regarding us abated,
We felt pretty chilly towards the end of the party.
They offered us no tea, though we each had an ice on a wafer.
Proud, supercilious, overweening ladies!_
[Illustration: IF YOU’RE MY FRIEND YOU’RE GREAT]
XXVI. LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT
WE decided to change our direction and make for the camp at the head
of Lake McDermot. This we could hope to reach by nightfall, as it was
downhill all the way. It was moreover a right-hand descent and suited
me well. In an hour of diving and plunging downward we got out of the
clouds and saw that there was fine weather away to the East. We had
moreover found a foot-trail, and, “Bless de Lo’d I’se found de way,”
cried Vachel.
Downward, downward to the low pines, to the large pines, to the giant
pines--how easy it was to go down. I thought we should have little
difficulty in getting to the little log-cabins of the camp, and sleep
dry for once. It was now ten days since we had last had a roof over
our heads. The prospect was pleasant; we thought of the hot supper
awaiting us. We thought of the drying of our clothes and our blankets,
and of a gentle sweet repose of our tumbled and jolted bodies between
white sheets.
The descent, however, suited Vachel as badly as the ascent had suited
me. As a short-legged man he had to take three steps to my one, and he
constantly serenaded me through the evening air--“Steeven ... wait a
minute! Little Vachel’s lonesome!”
I would stop, he would draw level. “Now wait a minute,” he would say.
“Let’s look back! What a wonderful view! Isn’t it a wonderful view?
Let’s sit here awhile and take it in--a _wonderful_ view!”
Or he would let me go on a bit and then stop me. “Stee-ven, look at the
pine-tree, look at the giant tree, giant of the forest, look what a
_great_ giant! Let’s sit down and take it all in!”
In the twilight we got to talking of oratory, which is one of the
poet’s pet themes. He holds that pure oratory is natural poetry. Bryan
is a poet; Patrick Henry was a poet; Daniel Webster was a poet. He
enunciated various famous lines to me, trying to rouse the mountains
with a sort of voice-of-God tone or air-bursting boom which the poet
commands--
Lib-er-ty _and_ Un-i-on ...
One ... and in-sep-ar-able ...
Now ... and ... for-everrr!
and he imitated Andrew Jackson saying--“_The Federal Union! It must and
will be preserved!_”
I found in the poet a curious creed, and that is, that oratory is
better than logic. He preferred the warm glowing orator to the cold
clear logician. He preferred Antony to Brutus, and put friendship above
merit. He justified the “Solid South” in being solid. He justified
Wilson for appointing his friends to power. He considered politics a
matter not of theories but of friendships and family ties. He justified
the spoils system to me. “When a man comes to power--he brings his clan
to power, his friends, the people of the village, and that is much
better than a collection of high-browed experts,” said he. He loathed
detraction and personal attacks of any kind. The commonest laudatory
adjective which he used to me in his conversations about his friends
was the adjective “loyal.” I could not persuade him to talk critically
of any of the literary work of his friends.
“Any poet who is a friend of mine is a good poet!” cried Vachel more
than once. “I’m _for_ him.”
* * * * *
WE came into view once more of fair Lake Josephine, but we could not
make much headway. We were held by conversational webs. The poet was
tired, and at every halting-place he started on some engrossing theme
which beguiled us into spending half an hour sitting on dead trees. He
was in the rôle of Scheherezade talking to her sultan. We ought to have
plunged down to the lake-shore, built a big fire and dried off, but I
was foolishly persistent in the idea of getting to the Many Glacier
camp that night. Presently we started talking of Roosevelt, and the
poet held me by the coat for a whole hour while he explained how he had
been carried off his feet by a Republican, and had defied his family
and voted for Roosevelt and had been struck out of the family Bible, so
to speak.
“I was for him until the end of his Presidency,” said Vachel. “He
refused to give business and high finance the first place, he would
not talk the holy gospel of tariff, he made the White House a national
centre of culture, he gave a great progressive lead, and rallied to
his banner the bright spirits of America; he hit the shams and the
frauds and the trusts; he stood by the Negro; he was not afraid to
express what he thought on any subject under the sun; he did not halt
between yes and no, and he was the very opposite of the Adams type of
politician.”
“But it burned him out,” Vachel went on. “He had a third and last
period when he was not himself, when he acted the young man, and
stage-managed the delusion of endless energy.”
And he told the story of Roosevelt’s last visit to Springfield with
great gusto, imitating Teddie’s mighty stride down through the people
to the platform, the war-cries and yells of the audience, the clash of
the brass-bands.
“And he was not an orator, and he did not believe in the spoils
system,” I interrupted maliciously. “And he did not believe in the
families ruling America----”
No wonder we got lost in the willows.
[Illustration]
_A’m ti-erd, yes a’m ti-erd,
A got th’ bloo-ooes aw-fool ba-ad.
Ma feet is sore;
You’s awful so-ore,
Ain’t ye, feet?
That fellah over the-ere
’S legs is just too lo-ong.
Now where’s he gwine to now?
Where’s he gwine to now?
I’se skeered he’ll leave me here a-lone,
All a-lo-one.
Say, Cap, doan go on so fa-ar,
Say, boss, you sure didn’t see that tree,
You cahn have no feelin’s for the view
Huhhyin’ on so fass--_
(Tired Feet Blues)
[Illustration: SHE SENT MORE RAIN AND LAUGHED AGAIN]
XXVII. THE WILLOWS
WHEN I was at Springfield I was brought before the children of the
High School, where in years past the poet went to school, two thousand
children in a grand auditorium. I think we could show nothing of
the kind in England, an assembly of nearly all the boys and girls
between the ages of twelve and sixteen in the city--white children,
black children, immigrant European children promiscuously grouped,
bright-faced and vivacious and feeling all-together. I was to speak
to them on Russia, but before my turn came the school did twenty
minutes’ practice at the school-yell. For there was a ball-match on the
morrow, and as a young orator cried out to them, “We are going to win
to-morrow. If the school is behind us we’ll win.”
The leaders of the school-yell came out of their seats, and they leapt
like Indians and flung their arms about and writhed and appealed and
struck the floor with the palms of their hands and appealed again.
Thus they gave “The Locomotive Yell,” which reminded me of the voice
of the Purple Emperor Express in Kipling’s locomotive story “.007.”
Thus they imitated a great steam-engine under full pressure of steam,
laboriously and mightily and then victoriously roaring forth from the
Grand Terminal--
Rah ... rah ... rah ... rah--
Spring ... field ... High ... School
(repeated four times with gradual acceleration)
Yea Springfield
Yea Springfield
Rah ... Rah ... Rah.
Vachel was visibly affected. “That’s where I get my inspiration,” said
he. “I just love them to death. I feel as if I’d got a snoot full o’
whisky. I just love them.”
It would be idle to deny that these yells did not raise every hair on
my scalp. It was an astonishing enkindling of the primitive. When I
stood up to speak to these children I felt myself on a mighty friendly
river. I was borne along by a rapturous enthusiasm which had been
started by the yells. The whole school, boys and girls, white and
coloured, were fused in one glowing whole. And Vachel said to me once
more, “There is America.”
What a contrast to England, where the children are not allowed to get
into this rapturous state! If you have faced the critical audience of
Rugby or Harrow, or the restrained maidenhood of a school like High
Wycombe, you realise the difference. If you are a moving speaker the
Head may even ask you “not to get the children excited.”
I was explaining this to Vachel. “Well,” said he, “that’s how it is
in England. The duelling spirit survives. Every one is still on his
guard. The American has thrown his shield away. Most human beings are
incapable of understanding anything till they are moved. That’s how we
do things in America, and go ahead, by whoops and yells--Whoopee!”
* * * * *
ROOSEVELT made America into one man. He mesmerised America. But the
spell failed, and many were disillusioned. His destruction of his own
Progressive party was a terrible blow.
We were walking now in the woods in the dark, and heavy rain had come
on, and we thought we were on a foot-trail and were not, and we got
into a lamentable jungle of devastated pines and wild undergrowth and
water. We walked in a circle, we tore our clothes afresh, we climbed
pitiably slowly over stark dead jagged trees and branches, and Vachel
forgot the subject of Roosevelt and of oratory, and began to make many
suggestions as to the right direction. We got so desperate that I said
to him:
“You think you know the way. Go ahead, I’ll follow.”
He wouldn’t do that.
“All right: you follow me. And no suggestions for twenty minutes. We’re
going to get out of here.”
We then plunged into a waste of tightly-packed willow trees, all about
ten feet high, with branches thickly interlaced. It was intensely dark,
and they soused us with water at every step. It was like breast-stroke
swimming through them. We came to a pine-tree island in the midst of
them, and then after a long struggle forward, as I thought, we came
back to the same pine trees. Then Vachel said, “Let us just lie down
here for the night. When morning comes it will be easier.”
But the ground under us was in slops of water, and rather than sit and
shiver there for hours I was all for getting out, and still believed
it possible. This faith or stubbornness was at length rewarded, for we
came to the water at the top of Lake McDermot, and it was nothing to us
to walk through thigh-deep water for half a mile and ford the river. We
were so soaked with the water of the willows that we must have made the
lake a little wetter.
So we made our way to the palatial hotel which is situated on the
north-eastern corner of Lake McDermot. Bedraggled, hanging in new
tatters and with water streaming into little pools on the floor when
we stood still, we were no people for the hotel. And we read on the
front door, “No one in hobnails or bradded shoes allowed to enter
here.” The many lights shone on our red faces for a minute, and then
we passed on--to the log-cabins of the campers and the hob-nailed
brethren. And there we got a room, and we opened our last can of pork
and beans and ate it to the bottom, and we rung out our streaming
clothes and hung them to dry, and we put Roosevelt and Bryan to sleep,
and the poet and the Guardsman were hushed.
[Illustration]
_The joke was on us and Nature laughed at us,
She laughed at us, she would not help us.
She sent more rain and laughed again,
Swish, swish!
Ha, Ha!
She laughed at us, she would not help us,
She sent more rain and laughed again._
[Illustration: SO FOR US HE MADE GREAT MEDICINE]
XXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED
I BUILT a fire by the roadside opposite the palatial hotel and made our
coffee. “It’s like lighting a fire and making yourself a personal cup
of coffee on Broadway,” said Lindsay, “but it’s fine.” It’s a dramatic
act and startles the imagination. The coffee-pot could be made the
emblem of revolt--“Go West, young man, with a coffee-pot. You can live
on nothing a year with a coffee-pot. Figure it out, how little money
you need to live in the wilds!”
Vachel is all for giving the business man and clerk and industrial
worker a three-months’ vacation. “They don’t work in these summer
months anyway,” says he. “But they are afraid of being reproached if
they take long holidays. Every man here, be he a millionaire or a poor
man, works. He has an office, he has a factory. If he hasn’t these,
he invents them. He believes it is effeminate to take more than two
weeks’ holiday. For a month’s holiday he must have the recommendation
of his physician. Otherwise he loses caste and may be called a ‘lounge
lizard,’ which is one of the terms of abuse which sting most. On
the other hand, modern work becomes every-day more sedentary, more
mechanical. In accountancy figures become more exclusive, in the
workshop automatic machinery becomes more and more perfect. It dulls
and enthralls the mind.”
“Yet how easy it is to get out and do what we are doing!” I urged in
agreement.
“Go, give them a message,” cried the poet.
“Intelligentsia of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your
chains. Young men and women, get free, get your coffee-pots, take up
the national parks and the free lands of the West!”
“I have an idea that most of the tramps and vagabonds of our
country-sides have had lives full of poetry. The men who are dismissed
as eccentrics were often mystics. America has not liked its Thoreaus
and its Chapmans.... Johnny Appleseed, for instance, who was an
American St. Francis, has been generally laughed at as a sort of a
harmless lunatic.”
We talked of this on the upward trail next day. One point in favour of
the hotel had been its good supply of canvas trousers. I bought myself
a pair, and was thereby saved the reproach of looking a little like
Johnny Appleseed in the matter of my attire. I laughed at Johnny for
having worn a tin can on his head for a hat, and Vachel was at pains to
defend him even there. But the poetry of his life was his going ahead
of the pioneers of Ohio and Indiana, and planting apple-orchards and
tending them and watching them grow for the America that should come
after him. I often wonder whether the large red-gleaming Ohio apples
of to-day do not come from him. I’ve stolen them and munched them
at dawn, as I tramped to the West, and I can testify how good they
were--good medicine.
“And so for us he made great medicine,” says the poet reverently,
quoting his own new poem.
Vachel in his quest for beauty was regarded by many as a crank, an
eccentric. He endured the humiliation of being village-idiot, or, as
they call it in the Middle West, “town-boob.” Awfully silly people who
thought themselves smart would stop in front of him with the air of a
Johnny Walker whisky advertisement and ask him quizzically if he were
“still going strong.” He was discovered later, and hailed and acclaimed
by the poets of America and England, but even then the dulled folk
of business and politics looked doubtfully upon him. He told me, for
instance, how a celebrated impresario introduced him to the notables of
the capital, but always with the formula--
“I want to introduce you to Mr. Vachel Lindsay of Springfield,
Illinois.... He is a pp--oet.”
So there’s a streak of sadness somewhere in the poet’s mind, and it
comes from brother-man. And that sadness has expressed itself in a
love of Johnny Appleseed and all others whom the Spirit drives into the
wilderness.
* * * * *
WE camped then under an overhanging crag of Mt. Justinian and watched
the moon, half eclipsed by a cliff, creep and crawl like a golden
turtle over the mountains, over the mighty tops, over the ... over the
world, whilst bright silver cloudlets in ball-robes danced lightly
amongst the stars. And we climbed next day by twenty-four zigzags to
the jagged summit, and rested in a grand snow-cavern as large as a
church, made by the winds and the drifts in dread mid-winter, and we
saw the clouds blow off the glaciers like washing-day steam out of a
kitchen door. The poet lifted his mighty voice to the rocks, and they
sent a kindred answer back to him. He called the snow-cavern Brand’s
Church, and it was a strange and thrilling place in which to abide.
They call the ridge of the mountain the “Garden Wall,” but it is not
very felicitously named. But it is wall-like. It is like an enormous
exaggeration of the Roman wall built to keep out the Picts and Scots
from England, but it is a rampart against the Martians rather than
against man.
We came at last to a joyous company in an old-fashioned inn, and
made happy acquaintance with a band of hikers and sportsmen and
mountaineers. Girls with riding-switches in their hands were dancing
with one another, and a tall dark striking one whom I called the
Spaniard chummed in with us and brought her friend and made Vachel
promise to recite. We had a mountain-climbers’ supper, and when this
was cleared away the bears came down the mountain toward us for the
leavings, and watched us eagerly and ate the sweets we threw them,
and when the bears were gone we built a huge bonfire and sat around
and watched the sparks fly upward, and told stories and chaffed one
another. And Vachel talked to us all of the virtue of the West and read
to us his poem of the hour--the story of Johnny Appleseed, who in the
days of President Washington made for us all--great medicine.
[Illustration]
_Thackeray advised us--
How to live on nothing a year.
“Take a nice little house in Mayfair;
Order everything and pay nothing.”
We can go one better than that.
Take over the Rocky Mountains
As your personal estate;
Everything arranged for you in advance,
Complete freedom of mind,
And no bills.
When the little game in Mayfair is played out
And you are clearly on the rocks,
Be sweet about it,
Leave your friends a card,
Tell them you’ve been advised a change of scene.
You’re on the Rockies._
[Illustration: HENCEFORTH I CALL YE NOT SERVANTS BUT FRIENDS]
XXIX. LOG-ROLLING
VACHEL slipped near Heaven’s Peak and turned a double somersault
downward, buffeting his head with his huge pack (crammed with canned
goods, loaves, blankets, and what not) and then I picked him up and
found he had sprained his ankle.
“Don’t think I’m hurt,” said the poet. “I yelled because I was scared.
I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
He didn’t mind the pain, but he loathed being beaten. Nevertheless he
was down and out. “We’ll go on to-morrow,” said he. “We’ll go on next
day.”
“Here we are, and here we remain,” said I, “till the ankle has
recovered. We can stay a week or two weeks, and I’ll go back for more
food. So let’s make up our minds to it.”
So we stayed by a flat-rocked stream on a grand slope in a forest of
stately pines and firs. Vachel sat on his blankets like a sultan. And
he speedily forgot his ankle and the mountains and Heaven’s Peak, and
began to tell me the story of Elbert Hubbard, from the time when he
travelled in Larkin’s soap to the time when he wrote “Who Took the
Lid off Hell?” and went down in the Lusitania. And then he told me
the substance of “A Self-made Businessman’s Letters to his Son,” that
unashamed best seller which portrayed the benevolent soul of a Chicago
packer before Upton Sinclair dared. Then he told me a fantastic story
of how ten ne’er-do-well men of Springfield were found ready to die for
the Flag. Then he told to me from memory Edgar Allan Poe’s story of
King Pest, and the ghouls of the forest crept close to us to listen.
Then he told me of the prairie-schooners which used to have inscribed
on them “Pike’s Peak or bust!”
“Heaven’s Peak or bust,” said I, maliciously pointing to his swollen
ankle. “Lindsay, essaying to climb Heaven’s Peak, slipped downward,” I
went on facetiously, imitating the style of my letters to the _Evening
Post_. He smiled.
“How yer feelin’?” I interjected.