But my brief hope fell to earth. A curt note from a married sister of
hers ... who first apologised for having read my letter.... But Mrs.
Tighe was abroad, painting in Spain.
The shock of having someone else, indubitably with a hostile eye, read
my letter, in which I had poured forth all my heart, made me almost
sick. I was chagrined inexpressibly.
* * * * *
The truth was, spring was coming on. Spring affects me as it does
migratory fowls. With its first effort of meadow and bough toward
renewed flowers and greenness, the instinct for change and adventure
stirs anew in me.
The school year was not yet up, but I didn't want to graduate.
* * * * *
At that time I had a passion for meeting well-known people.
It was then my only avenue of literary publication, so to speak. The
magazines were steadily returning my deluge of poems--I sent at least
three a week to them ... but to those who had established themselves I
could show my work, and get their advice and notice....
* * * * *
Walking along the main street, I ran into Jack Travers, the young
reporter who had dubbed me the "Vagabond Poet," the "Box-car Bard."...
"Well, what are you up to now, Gregory?"
"Nothing, only I'm thinking of a trip south to Osageville to pay a visit
to Mackworth, the Kansas novelist."
"That's the stuff ... I need another good story for the _Era_."
"I'm going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot."
"Great! 'Vagabond Poet' Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan. It's only
ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ...
but you'll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can
get the story in in time for this Sunday's _Era_...."
Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.
"Come on, we'll walk up an alley and I'll snap you just as if you were
on the way...."
"No, I won't do that!"
--"won't do what?"
--"won't fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will
have to be on the way!"
"Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo
you'll have to plough through?" he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to
take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud,
grumbling, to the edge of town.
There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my
feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that
clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually
on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in
my hand.
Travers waved me good-bye. "You'll see the story in the _Era_ Sunday
sure," he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled
at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.
* * * * *
It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the
horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.
My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first
impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the
impractical,--the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks
and small business men bred in my people for generations!...
I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and
sliding. Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached
the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that
came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets.
But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to
my knees. And the "squash-squish!" of my soaked feet in the mud plodded
a steady refrain of misery.
My Keats, at least, was dry. I kept the volume under my belt and against
my naked belly.
And I was happy and buoyed up by the thought, which lessened my
discomfiture, that Sunday morning thousands of readers in comfortable
homes would be reading about me, would gaze upon my photograph.
People looked out of their farmhouse windows at me as if an insane man
were stalking by.
It darkened rapidly.
My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which
it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of
places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the
following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college
had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more
a usual thing to beg or ask for shelter.
I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the
excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly
escaping from the edge of spilled molasses.
I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit
one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in
an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my
pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most.
The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped
and dripped.
And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I
climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit.
Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I
had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that
_I_ was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas....
And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who
had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we
were on the _Maria Crowther_ ... we were still off the coast of England,
and I had gone ashore for the last touching of my foot on English
soil....
There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment
of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth....
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,..."
The evening star made me dream of immortality and love--my love for
Fanny Brawne....
Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ...
voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of
Bacchus in _Endymion_ ... that was a big poem, after all....
Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....
"Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me."
"Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--"
"Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed
at that--for a time!)
* * * * *
I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had
served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall,
like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had
sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and
tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.
The mass of resistance I had to face, for poetry's sake, was too
enormous ... my country's motto was not "beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
but "blessed be that man who can make two hills of corn grow where one
bank of violets grew before," ... and my pilgrimage, in that hour of
vision, it disgusted me ... for I was making it not to some grand poet
like L'Estrange, but to the home of the chief exponent of the
"Honest-to-God, No-Nonsense-About-Me Hick School of Literature" ... and
associated with him was the syndicate poet, William Struthers, called
familiarly Uncle Bill, whose daily jingles run together as prose, were
now making him a fortune.
With the coming of dawn the day cleared, the sun glistened on a thousand
puddles, making them silver and gold....
By walking carefully on the side of the road, I made progress less
muddy. I was used to the squashing of the water in my shoes. The weather
turned warmer.
* * * * *
I found myself on the usual long one-street called Main Street, in the
prosperous little city of Osageville. It was Sunday. A corner loiterer
directed me to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth's house.
A habitation of sequestered quiet ... as I stood before the door I heard
the sunrise song of Rossini's _Wilhelm Tell_ ... a Red Seal record ...
accompanied by the slow, dreamy following of a piano's tinkle ... like
harp sounds or remote, flowing water.
I halted, under a charm. I waited till the melody was at an end before I
knocked. A small, pale-faced, pretty little woman answered.
"Does Mr. Jarvis Mackworth live here?"
"Yes. Come in. We have been expecting you. You are the poet, aren't
you?"
"Yes, I am the poet."
"You're a good walker ... we didn't expect you before Monday or
Tuesday.... Jarvis, here's the poet-boy from the university."
My host, unseen within, turned off another Red Seal record he had just
started, again to the accompaniment of the piano.... Kreisler's _Caprice
Viennoise_....
Jarvis Alexander Mackworth came forth like a leisurely duck, waddling.
He was very, very fat. He extended me a plump, white hand ... a slack
hand-shake ... but not an unhearty one, rather a grip of easy welcome.
A kind, rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a
gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Shelley's father, plump and
methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, shining ecstasy
of Shelley's countenance itself--you would have had Mackworth's face
before its time. I never beheld such spirituality in a fat man. His
stoutness was not unpleasing.
"My boy ... come in ... my God, you're all wet ... you look frail, too."
A pity shone in his eyes. "Minnie, call up Ally Merton ..." turning to
me, "I have, as you can see, no clothes to fit you ... but Ally might
have ... he's about your size, but he carries a trifle more meat on his
bones....
"Come in and dry yourself before the fire till he gets over."
We sat before the gas-fire of artificial logs.
"Minnie, will you make a cup of tea for this--poor boy," and he lowered
his voice at the last two words, realising that I was hearing, too.
"Yes, Jarv!"
* * * * *
I sat at the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on
the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in
accompaniment with the records ... it was Caruso now....
"A glorious voice, isn't it, young man?" Mackworth asked, as I ate
voraciously of the cold roast set before me ... of the delicious white
bread and fresh dairy butter, just from the churn of some neighbouring
farmer.
"I know nothing much about music," he continued, "--just appreciate it
... --seems to me that's what we need now, more than anything else ...
appreciation of the arts.... I like to sit here and pick out the
melodies on the piano as the tune runs on. It inspires me. The precious
people, the aesthetic upstarts, make fun of Edison and his 'canned
music,' as they call it ... but I say Edison is one of the great forces
for culture in America to-day. Everybody can't go to New York, London,
Paris, Bayreuth ... not to Chicago even....
"Beauty must come to Osageville, since Osageville cannot come to
Beauty."