I compounded with him by handing him over my _Illustrated History of
English Literature_. It was like tearing flesh from my side to part with
these volumes.
And now I had no more credit at the Y.M.C.A.
And I went back to Frank Randall, to apply again for my old room over
his shop. He was using it now to store old stoves in. But he moved them
out.
With a sense of despair, compensated by a feeling of sacrifice for my
poetry, I found myself once more back over the tinshop, the hammers
sounding and crashing below.
Old Blore, the cancer doctor, lived in a room in the front. All day long
he sat drinking rum and sugar ... and shipping out his cancer cure, a
white mixture like powdered sugar. Whether it did any good or not, he
believed in it himself....
I have not written about him before ... there are so many odd characters
that I came in contact with that I have not written about ... for this
book is about myself....
But old Blore ... he came waddling back to me, drunk, as usual, on his
rum and sugar.
"Welcome back, Johnnie ... come on, you and Frank, into my room ...
we've got to celebrate your return."
Frank and I set down the stove we were moving, dusted our hands off,
and followed.
"But I won't drink any of your rum, Ed! It's got too much of a kick."
"--nonsense ... good Jamaica rum never hurt nobody."
We drank several rounds of rum and water, with sugar. And we jocosely
joined together in singing the cancer doctor's favourite hymn--"We're
drifting down the stream of time, we haven't got long to stay."
Then Frank and Ed. retailed to me the practical jokes they had played on
each other since I had been gone from among them ... on big Sam, the
chocolate-coloured shoemaker who had his shop next door ... and an
obscene one on a half-wit named Elmer, who was one of Frank's helpers
... that, though it was pretty raw, made me choke and gasp with
merriment ... and they told me how, one night, they had wired the iron
roof in the back, so that about ten cats that were mewling and
quarrelling there, received a severe electric shock ... how funny and
surprised they'd acted.
* * * * *
Most serviceably a check from the _National Magazine_ came, for
twenty-five dollars ... I had sold them a prophetic poem on airships.
The check ameliorated my condition. I saw my way clear to a few weeks
more of regular eating.
* * * * *
Then, on top of that, one day a telegram came....
"Am on my way West. Will stop off visit you at Laurel--Penton."
* * * * *
Travers rushed the story to the Kansas City _Star_.
"KANSAS POET HONOURED
------------------------
AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM"
I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this
man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had
written the _Les Miserables_ of the American workingman.
* * * * *
Harry Varden, editor of the _Cry for Right_, had been to Laurel a week
previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at
the house of the "comrade" where he was passing the night. The comrade
sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out
of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen
underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the
bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the
masses, he, too, slept with windows shut.
Varden's monthly magazine _The World to Be_, had occasionally printed a
poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.
Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and
possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion,
even against himself.
I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to
time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped
on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him
on one of his lecture trips....
After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking
of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ...
reverently and with awe.
"Yes, yes," Varden assented, "Penton is all you say, but he has no sense
of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the
destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad
way, for a reformer, you know--gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so
many good openings....
"When Penton was writing _The Slaughter House_ and we were running it
serially, his protagonist, Jarl--it seemed he didn't know how to dispose
of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired
him 'for God's sake kill Jarl.' ...
"Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I
afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ...
and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book."
And Harry Varden laughed excitedly like a boy, and he leaned sideways
and smote his half-bent, sharp, skinny knee with his left hand. I could
perceive that that was a grotesque platform gesture of his, when he
drove a comic point home.
* * * * *
I was waiting at the station ... where I had shaken hands with Bob
Fitzsimmons, and had seen Emma Silverman off....
Penton Baxter was due on the eleven o'clock train from Kansas City.
I surely must be on the road to becoming somebody, with all these famous
people taking such an interest in me. I remembered Emerson's dictum
about waiting in one's own doorway long enough, and all the world would
come by.
Was I to be disappointed? It did not seem credible that the great man
would make a special stop-off on his way to the coast, just to pay me a
visit.
One after another the passengers stepped down and walked and rode away.
Then a little, boyish-looking man ... smooth-faced, bright-complexioned,
jumped down, wavered toward me, dropping his baggage ... extended his
hand ... both hands ... smiling with his eyes, that possessed long
lashes like a girl's.
"Are you Johnnie Gregory?"
"Penton Baxter?" I asked reverently. He smiled in response and drew my
arm through his.
"This is great, this is certainly great," he remarked, in a high voice,
"and I'm more than glad that I stopped off to see you."
He expanded in the sun of my youthful hero-worship.
"Where's the best hotel in town?"
"The Bellman House ... but I've arranged with the Sig-Kappas to put you
up."
"Are you a fraternity man?"
"No--a barb."
"I'd rather go to the hotel you named ... but thank the boys for me."
I contended with Penton Baxter for the privilege of carrying his two
grips. They were so heavy that they dragged my shoulders down, but, with
an effort, I threw my chest out, and walked, straight and proud, beside
him.
As we walked he questioned and questioned. He had the history of Laurel
University, the story of my life, out of me, almost, by the time we had
covered the ten blocks to the hotel.
"Penton Baxter!" I whispered in a low voice to the proprietor, who, as
he stood behind the desk, dipped the pen with a flourish, and shoved the
open register toward his distinguished guest.
* * * * *
Travers, of course, was the first to see the great novelist. He wired an
interview to the _Star_, and wrote a story for the Laurel _Globe_ and
the _Laurelian_.
Baxter said he would stay over for two days ... that he didn't want to
do much beside seeing me ... that he would place himself entirely in my
hands. I was beside myself with happy pride.
"This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this
afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the
South East."
"We call it Azure Mound."
"Has it any historical interest?"
"--don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about
here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there
are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's
company."
Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Shelley as he traipsed
along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ...
unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....
His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong
Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth
was loose and cruel--like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or
woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair
on an old maid's face.
More than a year later his wife confided to me that "Pennie," as she
dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at
his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....
Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a
rising tide of invisible opposition.
I discoursed of a new religion--a non-ascetic one based on the
individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life--that I meditated inaugurating
as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least
Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His
face lit with frolic....
Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he
himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make
sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.
Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest,
Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.
Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the
wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of
Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how,
at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators
... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public
office.... "Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public
life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American
politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his shoes to
his hat...."
"Suppose, Mr. President," Baxter had put to him, at the same time
expressing his amazement at the president's open manner of speech before
men he had never even met before ... men perhaps of antagonistic shades
of opinion, "suppose I should go out from here and give to the
newspapers the things you have just said! How would you protect, defend
yourself?"
"Young man, if you did--_as you won't_--" smashed Roosevelt, with his
characteristic of clenched right fist brought down in the open palm of
the left hand--"if you did--I'd simply brand you as a liar ... and shame
you before the world."
"And so it was that Roosevelt expressed himself freely ... and at the
same time protected himself."
* * * * *
We stood on the top of Azure Mound. Baxter was puffing heavily, for it
had been a hard climb.
At our feet extended a panorama of what seemed like a whole State.
The wide-spread fields of wheat, of corn, exalted us.
"God, what a glorious country!... no wonder Walt loved America ... in
spite of the abuses capital has perpetrated in it."
"Walt Mason?" I enquired, mischievously....
"No," he responded, seriously, "Walt Whitman."
"But our poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State
philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God
stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite of her wide,
scenic vistas....
"Nevertheless," I went on, "Kansas does develop marvellous people ... we
have Carrie Nation--"
"And Johnnie Gregory!" put in Baxter.
"I don't want just to belong to Kansas."
It was I who was humourless now, "I'm sick of its corn-fed bourgeois
ideals ... I want to belong to the world--as--you do!"
We trudged back to town.
"What a site for a university!... the men who put those buildings up
there on the Hill must have dreamed greatly ... look at the sun!... the
buildings are transfigured into a fairy city!"
* * * * *
My office as social manager for Baxter during his stay I conducted
badly. I was so excited and flattered by the visit of one whom I
considered one of the first geniuses of the world, that I hardly knew
what I was doing. I listened to all he said as if an oracle spoke.
I asked him if he would like to meet some of the professors on the
Hill.... I hurriedly gathered together a small group of them and Baxter
gave a talk to them in one of the unoccupied recitation rooms. Nor did
he fail in telling them that in me Kansas had a great poet in the making
... the professors who were not invited to my hasty reception considered
themselves slighted.
When I saw Baxter off at the station we were calling each other by our
first names.
"Good-bye, Johnnie!"
"Good-bye, Penton!"
"Don't fail to visit me at Warriors' River, this fall, if you can do so
conveniently."