“Shall we get to Canada?”
“I’ll be all right to-morrow.”
“We ought to have gone further whilst the goin’ was good, eh?”
“I’m sorry, Stephen,” said he apologetically.
“But this is good?”
“It’s good enough for me.”
“All right.”
* * * * *
BRINGING in wood for a big fire is rather a tedious job, but I hit on
a sporting way of doing it all by myself, and doing it better. We were
at seven thousand feet, and the avalanches and spring floods and storms
had wrought havoc among the trees. Fine dead trunks lay in scores
on the mighty slope of the mountain. Our fire was at the foot of a
slippery granite slide. So I took a stout young pine-tree, and began
to lever the great dead trees and set them rolling downward. Vachel
was perched on a rock above the fire, and the logs arrived at the
embers below like colliding locomotives, with a great bump and showers
of sparks. It was possible to lever and roll downwards logs that were
thirty or forty feet long, and we pulled the great lumps of their
sprawling resinous roots on to the fire.
We slept that night among the granite shelves, and the pine-roots
roared as they burned, and the great rocks beside the fire cracked
under the heat with a sort of earthquake thud which registered a buffet
on our bodies ten yards away.
We stayed four days in this wonderful spot, and I became fascinated
with log-rolling. Even Vachel, with his ankle, hobbled after me and
tried to do it too. We talked of political and literary log-rolling,
log-rolling for one’s friends. “I’m all for it,” said the poet.
“Log-rolling is a virtue.”
Then he recounted to me the origin of the expression--log-rolling. “It
is a Western term,” said the poet. “It also comes from the life of
the pioneers. You know how it was; the settler chose the site of his
log-cabin or of his new barn, and then went into the forest and felled
the number of trees necessary, and he left them lying where they had
fallen, and then called his friends together for a festive occasion.
They all worked together for him, and rolled his logs to the most
convenient spot where they could be piled to make his home. Of course
he always gave his friends a luncheon first, and then they went off and
rolled his logs home for him.”
“And I like that,” said the poet. “No man can hope to do much in this
world without the help of friends. And I for one would not want to.”
Go to it then, ye log-rollers of the literary world, ye friends, we’ll
lunch ye, we’ll give you, coffee with a kick of a mule in it, and fried
corned-beef hash fit for the best friend of the Grand Vizier’s cook.
And he, as you know, fares better than the Sultan himself.
[Illustration]
_Who rolled home Shakespeare’s logs?
We did: we helped to do it.
All the world has given a hand.
Were they lunched first?
Ah, I doubt it.
But that was not Shakespeare’s fault,
He was a jolly fellow!_
_N.B._--According to Frederick Dallenbaugh, writing to the _New
York Post_, the real log-rolling commences after the logs have been
brought to the site:
“The foundation logs for the house having been duly notched and fixed
in position, another tier is placed on top of them, and then another,
and so on till the log wall is of the prescribed height. Now, it is
obvious that it would be difficult to lift the logs up on to this
growing wall. Primitive science then comes to the builder’s aid.
Other logs are placed at an incline against those already established
in their position and the logs that are to surmount the lower logs
are rolled up the incline into place.
“From this came the invitations sent out by the prospective builder
to come to his log-rolling.”
[Illustration: POOR ACTÆON PAYS * THE WOMAN NEVER PAYS]
XXX. TOWARD THE KOOTENAI
SUMMER began to give way to winter on the mountains. There were very
cold nights, and frost. The full moon made the forest spacious, and the
beautiful fir-trees, like candelabras, glittering with silver lights.
The mornings were of an intense stillness as if ordained whilst God
walked in the garden. We had stayed three days beside a grey rock wall
which was eight feet high, and it began to have the light of home upon
it, and one might have lived there long.
Vachel soon began to feel much better, though he looked quaint,
hobbling along the rocks and uneven woodland holding on to a tall
pine-cudgel which he had cut. He wore a red cotton handkerchief over
his crumpled hat, and it was tied in knots under his chin. He was weak
at all joints and walked like a dwarf who lives in a hollow tree, a
fairy-like antediluvian old fellow. His red wind-blown face was lined
and lined. His eyes twinkled as he walked. He stooped to pick up wood,
he looked cautiously about him, and I had the feeling that he would
rapidly scurry away if a human being came into view.
I returned to camp for a bagful of provisions, and bright-faced Myrtle
La Barge gave me a whole apple-pie to take to the poet in memory of
Johnny Appleseed, and she gave me large overweight of cheese and
apricots and ham and all the rest I asked for. That night a bear came
after us, smelling the ham, and I said to him, “Bite Daniel, bite him,
bite him!” and the bear studied us some paltry half-hour, but as the
Comick saith, “his mind was in the kitchen.” And he said to the poet
with a disappointed groan--“How about the ham?” But Vachel then waved
his pine-cudgel and the bear did waver with his hind-quarters and ran
away. The poet then became a silent watcher for the rest of the night.
We set off next day for the Kootenai River, and Vachel had tied up
his game foot in a dozen ropes and bindings, and it was soaking in
iodine besides, and we went very slowly and he sang hymns all the way.
I said to him, “You won’t mind, Vachel, if I go ahead some distance.”
For his singing scared the wild animals. The white-vested woodpecker
walking like a great fly up the dead poles of old pines, tapping as he
went, paused meditatively at the sound of Vachel’s voice; the grouse
and the ptarmigan tripped ahead of us like hens, and scurried out of
view; little piggy the porcupine trembled in all his beautiful quills;
and the squirrels scolded from all the trees as if we were a terrible
annoyance. I am not surprised. At school at Springfield the teacher
used to say; “All sing except Vachel,” the reason being that he has his
own voice entirely. Thus, in slow and devastating accents, keeping pace
with the enforced slow walk and pine-cudgel progress, you might have
heard him singing--
We ... shall ... dwell ... in that fair and happy ... land
Just across ... from the ever-green sho-o-re.
and I put distance between us, but ever as he caught up I could hear
the scared animals rushing away. I grew facetious about the ever-green
shore, after he had sung it fifty-five times, and he, with utter
meekness, gave it up from that hour forth and sang instead:
When he cometh, when he cometh,
To make up his jewels.
* * * * *
WE descended into a profound and shadowy valley where the pines and
firs got loftier as if trying to reach the level of the mighty cliffs
above them, but all their branches hung in veils of the tillandsia
moss. Here were firs with thousands of Uncle Sam beards of yellow-green
hair hanging from thousands of sharp chins. The great depth of the
brown floor of the forest was roofed in by darkness, and tree-tops and
moss. We came down to a wild brawling stream which rent the forest in
twain and let in the fairness of the sky and the sun. It was a perfect
place and I must say we did not expect to meet anybody there.
We took off our clothes in the sun, and naked Lindsay took his shirt
to wash in the stream. Naked, I made a fire by the water-edge, and put
on the coffee-pot to boil. The water of the river was ice-cold, and
surreptitiously dipping a limb in it, one registered the fact. Many
brown comma butterflies danced in the sunshine, and settling on our
arms and legs, tickled us, throwing their honey-tubes deep into our
pores and getting their luncheon before we got ours. Evidently we were
a couple of sweet boys.
Our innocence was, however, sharply disturbed by an unwonted cry and a
shout, and a red-faced, large-eyed, half-breed Indian suddenly appeared
on horseback along the river shore. He was trying to protect the eyes
of his party. But he was too late. We made a rapid scramble and dived
as a party of five highly-amused girls came past, and following them a
dozen pack-mules, carrying their camping outfits and party-frocks.
I lay in the water after that and thought it over whilst a cascade of
melted snow rushed down my neck, and I saw on the shore the coffee-pot
lifting its lid and spitting many times. Presently I saw the Indian
re-appear and struggle through the forest wreckage of the river-bank.
“The party apologises,” says he, “for coming upon you unexpectedly.” I
apologised in return.
[Illustration]
_When Actaeon saw Artemis at her bath,
The goddess changed him to a stag.
And when Tiresias saw Athene thus
She robbed him of his eyes.
But when these goddesses saw Actaeon and Tiresias
A-bathing,
They laughed.
We meant nothing to them
Compared with what they knew they meant to us._
[Illustration: FROM THE FIRE TO THE DARK GOES THE TINY SPARK]
XXXI. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD
WE lunched on ham and peas and caramel cake, and lay in a natural
cradle among the roots of giant firs, and slept for an hour of a
perfect afternoon. After the ice-cold dip and scalding coffee and a
good feed and a self-indulgent snooze, we knew ourselves to be well and
certainly happy. What a thing is physical well-being--to be hard, to
be fit, to be cool, to be clear-headed, to know there’s a live spring
in every muscle, and then to be care-free and able to sleep in the
afternoon!
Vachel’s ankle went very well, the danger was that he might do too much
on it. We walked three or four miles up stream and then camped for the
night on a wild triangle alongside a mighty barricade of the jetsam of
broken water-washed tree trunks, some as long as fifty feet. We lodged
in the profound trough of a characteristic Western canyon. Night came
quickly, and our camp-fire light obscured the stars. The giant trees
with shadowy bases climbed sheer out of sight into the murky sky above.
The brown and white foaming river, like hundreds of swimming beavers,
rolled onward past us all the while. We boiled from it, washed clothes
in it, made soap-foam over it, but the ever-freshening waves purified
our margins faster than we could sully them. We paddled about in bare
feet on the shore and gathered wood whilst the firelight played on the
stones, and we heaped high the bonfire. I stood on a mighty chief of
the forest and flung lesser logs from the water-washed wood barricade
right to the fire, and they landed one after another with a thud and a
roar in the midst of the flames. Then we lay flat on our backs on our
blankets and watched our sparks fly up and die in scores, in thirties,
in fives, in thirty-fives, in hundred and fives. What a giddy and wild
life some of them had! How they whirled! How impetuous were some, how
serpentine others! We saw how all of them trailed their light as the
first escaped from the fire, and were like serpents of flame.
“They do not die,” said the poet. “They only seem to die; they go
on, like ideas, into the invisible world. I’d like to write a volume
of adventures, the story of the adventures of, say, twelve different
sparks.”
It was very white wood and very red fire. And it was slow-burning, for
the resin had been washed out of all their boles. The fire glowed and
glittered and was sociable and was taking time to live and taking time
to die. Our eyes grew hot and staring, like children’s eyes sitting
in front of the yule-logs listening to Christmas tales after their
bed-time hour.
Our thoughts fly up brightly and then disappear, but goodness knows
where they go to. Our fancies stream upward idly like little flaming
serpents. Life is a fire, and we keep on burning and throwing up
sparks. We are very pretty, if we could only see ourselves, with our
thoughts and fancies jumping out of us and flying from us. The fire
will burn out towards dawn, and then the sparks will cease. They’ll
only be a happy memory then. But the poet believes the sparks go on.
What a silence! The river is roaring past like the river of time
itself, but we have forgotten it, we have detached ourselves from
it, and beside our little fire there is a silence all our own. We
have a silence and a noise at the same time. There is a stillness and
aloofness and a sense of no man near.
A disturbing thought comes. “If there were an earthquake in San
Francisco you’d feel the tremor here. If there were an earthquake in
the West the river might suddenly flow over us.” We listened, we tried
to sense the sleeping world, the ball on which we were lying. How
still, how peaceful it was! Not a tremor, not a quiver from beneath us!
Old earth slept the perfect sleep of a child. We too could sleep that
way, and presently some one spoke but the others did not reply, did not
dare. One was left speaking and the other was asleep. All became still
and quiet in the temple. The candles were still burning. But the priest
had gone. It was night, and the Spirit reigned in serenity. And the
candles were still burning.
[Illustration]
_A tiny spark was born to-day;
It said good-b’ye to yesterday.
It carried up a tiny light,
Said good-day and then good-night.
“Good-morrow!” said the tiny spark,
But ere the morrow came ’twas dark.
So that’s the best that he can do,
In his own time say “How d’ye do.”_
[Illustration: LINCOLN
THE STAR OF THE EAST BECOMES THE STAR OF THE WEST]
XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD
NEXT day, tramping to Flat Top Mountain, we talked of Springfield and
Abraham Lincoln. We were in stately forests, and the ancient mould
under the feet silenced our steps. We walked slowly, and stopped to
pick the big black huckleberries, paused to climb over stricken trees,
paused to eat the raspberries from the undergrowth of raspberry bushes.
“I’d like you to think of Lincoln as a poor man,” said Vachel,
“an eccentric--laughed at, sneered at a great deal, entirely
underestimated, a man who was a mystic, who believed in dreams and
presentiments and told many dreams to his Cabinet with great gravity.
Politicians want to see in him a conventional great man now, but in his
life-time he was called eccentric. He was as much laughed at as Johnny
Appleseed. But if a man is called eccentric in this country, or much
laughed at, you’ll often find he was a mystic or a genius of some kind.”
One of Vachel’s alternative ideas for a tramp was to do a Springfield
star, making the city our centre to radiate outward, or, could I say,
walk radiantly outward, in one direction, then in another, all round
the compass. “As you went to Bethlehem with the Russian pilgrims so you
could pilgrimage to our Bethlehem,” said he, “see our star.”
People from all parts of the world come to Springfield to see the
Lincoln home, to visit Salem and the grave of Anne Rutledge, to salute
Lincoln’s grave. They do so, not because they are told to do so, or
because there are organised tours, but because the heart moves them to
it.
But there are also many people in America ready to turn their backs on
the simple Abe Lincoln of Springfield. He is too rough for them, too
untidy, too raw. They would fain think of him as a man of aplomb, a man
of a well-established family, one of the governing class. Lincoln’s
son Robert is president of the Pullman Car Company, and they would see
the father in the son and surmise a family well-lined, well-wadded,
well-upholstered. In that class you can get to power, and be carried
there, and sleep on the way. Belong to that class and all is yours!
But the real Abe Lincoln gives the lie to this. It offends some people
to the heart to think that Lincoln’s father lived in a three-ways-round
log-cabin with the fourth side not built in, that young Abraham was a
barge-man, what we call in England a bargee, and came down the Sangamon
River in a flat-bottomed boat with a cargo and got stuck on the dam
at Salem and accepted a job there, and slept in a sort of loft over a
ramshackle tavern, men one side of a plank, women the other, and that
he rose out of the very depths of American life.
“What Lincoln did, any boy in the United States can aspire to do,”
cried Vachel as we sat on a log together and looked at the shadow and
shine of the myriad-fold population of trees. “We’ve no governing
class. We’ve only got a class that thinks it is the governing class,
but it is the most barren in the community. Lincoln’s life shows
the real truth. Any one who feels he has it in him can rise to the
Presidency of the United States.”
I promised to make the pilgrimage to the Lincoln shrines when our tramp
should be over and we returned to Springfield. Then Vachel was fired
by his pet fancies about his native city. He would have it all painted
white, like the Chicago World’s Fair. “White harmonises all sizes and
shapes of houses and all types of architectural design. And it has an
effect on the mind. It suggests the ideal. If the city were all painted
white, then people would try to live up to its appearance. Then also
it would stand out among all cities of America. The very fact of its
painting itself white would go into every newspaper in the United
States, it would be known in all English-speaking lands and would
direct world-attention to the shrine of Abraham Lincoln,” said he.
It seemed to me a practical idea, and I bade him preach it still. He’d
find valuable allies in the paint merchants and painters of Springfield
anyway. If America could go “dry” one need not despair of Springfield
painting itself white. “In America all things are possible,” as a
German street-song says.
He returned once more to his story of the ten who died for the flag
of Springfield--the new flag of the city. “I’ve always felt,” said
he, “that there could be found at least ten men among the unlikely
fellows who loaf around our town square ready to give their lives for
Springfield. If ever there came a time when Springfield was in danger
or its flag likely to be dishonoured, I know it is from the tramps and
wasters that something would come. At least, from the people we don’t
know.”
“If only I could write that idea as Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘King Pest,’”
said the poet, “then I’d tell the truth and shame the Devil.”
* * * * *
“YET Springfield was once disgraced by a most unholy race-riot,” my
companion went on. “It was in 1908, the centenary of Lincoln’s birth,
and I felt it as a terrible disgrace. The negro victims were entirely
innocent. It was a shocking affair.”
We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys
and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the
forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the
eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. We saw
in retrospect many of the mountains we had climbed. “Going-to-the-Sun”
and “Heaven’s Peak” were remote but grandiose on the horizon. We were
on a much-exposed ridge of Flat Top Mountain, and we camped in a wintry
spot beside a natural table of rock. On the rock we spread our supper;
on the ground our blankets. The wind blew the flaps of our blankets,
it blew away the flaming embers of the bonfire which we made, and it
ignited the grass, and when we had put the fire out on one side it
broke out on the other, and yet there was not enough of a fire to warm
us. Night came on, and we sought new fuel. Vachel hobbled beside me and
discoursed in a preoccupied way about Springfield and its race-riot.
“I’m with you all the way about the Negroes, Stephen,” said he, as we
struggled to upraise an embedded sapling which the snows had tumbled
over in the spring. “If you write about the Negro again, say I’m with
you, I subscribe to it. I’ll go the limit with you.”
We raised the entangled, difficult, fallen tree up on to the star-radii
of its roots, and looked down the wild slope to where our fire was
burning and blowing. It was dark up there where we were, and the fire
below gleamed in the darkness. We rolled the sapling down to the
fire and on to it, and stamped out the flames in the grass, and then
returned into the darkness for another sapling.
“You know how I felt in Springfield when that riot occurred,” said
Vachel. “I visited all the leading Negroes and most of the leading
white men. I bombarded the newspapers with letters. And I don’t know
that it did any good. You couldn’t be sure that another onslaught on
the coloured people wouldn’t occur to-morrow.”
As we talked we sought and collected withered branches, wind-riven arms
of the pines. Some we had to pull out of the earth, others we could not
pull out.
“I believe the only way to stop lynching would be to break into a
lynching crowd and make them either lynch you instead of the Negro or
lynch you for interfering. When they realised what they had done their
hearts would be touched, their consciences would be shocked,” said
Vachel.
We had unwieldy faggots in our arms and so walked closely together down
the hill, supporting one another’s wood.
“It is expedient that one man should die for the people once more,”
said the poet.
We made up a good fire; we boiled a pot of coffee and fried a heap of
beans and stewed a cup of apricots and cut the bread and untied the
sugar-bag and exposed the dried raisins, of which we had a capacious
little sack-full and wrapped ourselves round and sat by the fire and
fed and talked--
“Springfield was just about to attract the attention of the world in a
special way, as the shrine of Lincoln, when that riot broke out,” said
Vachel. “Large schemes had been approved for the improvement of the
city. All promised well. Then suddenly this race-riot broke out, and
Springfield was the subject of cartoons all over the United States.
The finger of scorn was pointed at Lincoln’s city. Springfield is still
trying to live it down.”
I confessed it was difficult to think of Springfield as an American
Bethlehem after it had been the scene of a race-riot. That was indeed
a smudge on its fair name. Quiet little Bethlehem in Palestine has at
least kept clear of that. Still even Bethlehem could not help it if
some ugly human doings occurred there.
It was curious that the race-riot sprang from the “poor Whites,” and
yet from the same poor Whites Vachel was ready to find ten who would
die for the Flag.
I told my thought then, and that was, that the poor white population,
heroic as it was, would not be deterred by the self-sacrifice of one
of their number for the sake of the Blacks. This very year an English
clergyman was stripped and beaten almost to death by a gang of Whites
in Florida, just because he asked a congregation for fair play for the
Negro. And nothing happened to the gang. No prosecutions followed.
Lynch is powerful when law is weak.
“The social conscience is dull,” said the poet sadly. “The Negro
question is the one which has most plagued America, and most people
have given it up and decided not to fret their brains any more about
it. You see, we even fought a war for it once, and we’re always
quarrelling about it. A news paragraph about a man being burned by a
mob will not even catch the notice of the newspaper reader. It either
does not stir his imagination, or he refuses to think about it.”
“But it brings America into disrespect in Europe. It takes away from
the force of her moral example,” said I.
Lindsay knew that. We discussed then the daring appeal of Governor
Dorsey of Georgia to the people of that State to mend their ways. We
discussed South Africa and then India.
And then we went for more wood, and the stars shone out above us,
peerless in their righteousness, rolling along deliberately as ever on
their fixed ways. “How brightly they shine on us,” said I. “We should
be as they. If they erred and strayed from their ways as we do, what a
mad universe ’twould be.”
“And one of them,” said the poet, “is the star of Bethlehem, the star
that rested over Bethlehem and then rested over Springfield for a
while.”
“Up here in the mountains we see the stars, but down there in the
forests and dark valleys it is not so easy,” said I.
We talked of Springfield by the firelight till one of us fell asleep.
One picture remains in my mind, and that is of a Hindu who sought out
Vachel Lindsay after he had been to Abraham Lincoln’s home. “Show me
now the home of the poet who lives among you,” said the Hindu.
[Illustration]