For I had spoken with him of my determination to ship on the Great Lakes
for a few months, to see if I couldn't garner some poetic material for
my poems of modern life that I was writing for the _National Magazine_.
"My wife and I will be at Warriors' River till late in the fall. We're
staying at Stephen Barton's Health Home. Barton is a good friend of
mine.... I am helping him out, since he left New Jersey, where he was
forced, by a series of petty prosecutions, to give up Perfection
City.... My wife will be glad to see you ... she knows your poetry
already."
* * * * *
The weather was warm again. My next to my last college year was drawing
to a close. Not that I was a graduate ... my course was a special one,
and I had not followed even that closely.
"If you'll graduate," Jarvis Alexander Mackworth urged me, joking in the
Kansas fashion, "I will present you with a great bouquet of beauty
roses.... I'd like to see you vindicate Langworth's and my judgment of
you. For you have many, many professors and people on the Hill who don't
believe in you, and, frankly,--say it was a mistake ever to have let you
in."
Mackworth was one of the regents of the school.
"In fact, once one of the professors rose, at a meeting, ably reinforced
by several others, to complain that you were actually crazy, and a
detriment to the school."
"And what did you say, Mr. Mackworth, didn't you defend me?"
"Yes, God pity me, I did," he jested. "I remembered how I was asked to
quit here, too. In the days when General Fred Furniss was also looked on
as an unruly, rather undesirable member of the student body ... we were
classmates....
"I replied that no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!...
but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus
... it might make them more alive and interesting."
Again I was absolutely starvation-ridden. Several tramp-poems that I
sold to _Everybody's_ kept me literally in bread and cheese for a month.
I was still madly in love with Vanna at long distance.
There came an opportunity for me to make a few dollars and to show off
before her, at the same time.
The Copperwell Street Show came to town. They lined the main street with
booths, and outside of town, in a large pasture, circus tents were
pitched, in which the usual one-ringed circus was to be shown ... and
they had six lions in a cage ... advertised as Nubian lions, the largest
and fiercest of their kind ... their trainer never going in among them
except at peril of his life. A gold medal was offered to anyone who
would go in among the lions alone, and make a speech to the audience
from the inside of the cage.
I negotiated with the management, but asked for the medal's equivalent
in money. I was offered twenty-five dollars if I would go in, and repeat
my speech, each one of the three nights the show would be held.
I was to go in for the first time that very night ... to clinch my
lagging resolution, the story was printed in the local papers....
"JOHN GREGORY TIRED OF LIFE
------------------------
KANSAS POET TO TALK AMONG LIONS,"
Jack Travers was at his facetious best.
Considering myself heroic, and thinking with inner joy how Vanna Andrews
would be there, I spent the day in committing to memory the salient
points on the nature and habits of lions, from the Encyclopedia
Britannica....
People looked at me both with amusement and admiring amazement as they
saw me about, late that afternoon....
"Now tell me the honest truth about the lions," I asked of the trainer.
"They're a pretty bad lot."
"Come on. I've made up my mind to go in, and I'm not afraid."
"--though lions are not as bad as leopards and tigers ... there's no
telling when they might jump you ... there's only one chance in a
thousand that they will ... but you may bring one up from being a cub
... and, one morning, because of something you can't read in its animal
mind--it not liking its breakfast or something--it may jump you, give
one crunch, and snuff you out like a candle ... it's that chance that
you take that makes it seem brave."
"Thanks, I'll take the chance."
"Are you sure you'll have enough command of yourself to make a speech?"
"--Certain ... I've committed to memory almost all the Encyclopedia
Britannica article on lions ... I'm going to give them that...."
* * * * *
"Gregory! Gregory!" the crowd was calling, half in derisive jocularity,
half in uneasy admiration....
The trainer shunted me into the cage, after seating his lions in a
half-moon on their tubs.
"Quick! Step in! We'll be on the outside ready with hot irons in case
anything goes wrong!"