When he left, Guy Vanton had in his pocket the sum of $350. With part
of this he bought a railway ticket to San Francisco. He boarded the
train, and as it was evening, dined, retreated to the club car, smoked
and read for a couple of hours, and then went to his compartment.
The main thing was plainly to hit upon something to do that would make
a little money, enough for his necessities, while he made acquaintance
with the world, the real world, the world outside himself, outside Blue
Port, outside his peculiar past.
It had taken him a long time to realize that what he needed, what he
must have if life were to become worth living, was a touchstone in the
shape of some direct experience, real and rough--something that would
not be eaten away by the acid of his thoughts nor carven into gargoyles
and grotesques, the chisellings of memory.
Guy Vanton was a poet. It was natural that he should recall the lives
and adventures of other poets, and in the performance of Vachel
Lindsay he found an example of what he sought. Lindsay had gone about
the country with scrip and wallet preaching a gospel, the gospel of
beauty, exchanging his poems, printed on slips of paper, for food and
lodging. In the Colorado ranges, along Southern roads to the doors of
mountaineers’ cabins, by Kansas wheatfields, and over stretches of
prairie, from farmhouse to farmhouse Lindsay had travelled--chanting,
reading, conversing, discoursing--and these adventures he had afterward
chronicled. Guy had no armful of poems to read in exchange for food
and a bed; he was certainly not the possessor of a gospel that people
would stop to hear. He could not emulate Lindsay and the idea of doing
it, to give him credit, never entered his head. What struck him was the
fact that in America, at any rate, there was still room for a pioneer.
Americans find something zestful and admirable in the spectacle of a
man breaking a new path.