"A close shave, sir!" I remarked.
When I brought him his breakfast he was still trembling.
* * * * *
I left the package freighter _Overland_. It was almost time for the new
school year. But Warriors' River lay in my way back to Laurel, and I
determined to stop off and pay a visit to Baxter, at Barton's Health
Home....
* * * * *
I was disappointed with my summer. In terms of poetic output. I had
written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and
these were barely publishable in the _National Magazine._ I realise now
that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for
game. It cannot be deliberately sought and found. It must just happen.
Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live
in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words. I
knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon. And
there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian
coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth
with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full,
just-risen moon, over Huron....
I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ...
for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the _National_,
and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them.
But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin
came into the coal-passer's eyes. Then I had been ashamed of myself ...
"Of course I'll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!" I slid
into my pants and went up the ladder--
To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and
across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud
... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled,
with an ecstasy of quivering silver....
I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt
beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of
expression,--with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved,
a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or
sunset.
* * * * *
I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living
in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the
Health Home. These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there
was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for
towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building. I
think the tents were even wired for electric light.
Baxter welcomed me. But I took a room for a week in town, though he
urged me to stay with him. But when I had the means I liked better to be
independent. I calculated living a week in Warriors' River for ten or
twelve dollars. That would leave me thirty dollars over, from what I had
earned while working on the _Overland_.
Then, back to the university for my last year of leisurely study and
reading, in the face of the desolate poverty that would have defeated
many another man, but to which I was used as a customary condition.
After that--Paris or London, or both! Kansas was growing too small for
me.
* * * * *
I have mentioned that Baxter had a head too large for his body. Daniel,
his son, slight and frail and barely eight years of age, possessed the
same characteristic....
I footed it out to Baxter's tents, faithfully as to a shrine, each
afternoon. The mornings he and I both occupied in writing. He, on a
novel which was the story of the love-life of his wife and himself, and
of his literary struggles, called _Love's Forthfaring_; I, on my
abortive songs of the Great Lakes that all came forth still-born ...
because I was yet under the vicious literary influence of the _National
Magazine_, and was writing my verse, trying to be inspired by the
concepts of middle-class morality ... or what was even worse, I was
attempting to glorify the under-dog; who, if he were the demigod
Socialists portray him, would by no means remain the under-dog.
* * * * *
I found Baxter more a-flame than ever for the utter reformation of
mankind ... in the way they dressed ... stiff collars hurt the nervous
system, pressing as they did, on the spine ... in the books they read
... he wished to start a library that would sell cheaply and bring all
the world's great thought and poetry into factory, and every worker's
home ... all conventional ideas of marriage and religion must go by the
board and freedom in every respect be granted to men and women.
It was good to listen to this sincere, naïve man, still young ... who
would re-make life nearer to the beauty and harmony that Shelley also
dreamed for mankind. I lived in a state of perpetual reverence toward
Baxter. This man tried to live his ideals, as well as write about them.
In matters of diet I accepted Baxter's theories but, humanly, did not
live up to them. He was a vegetarian.
Later I was to learn that he was to himself an experiment station. On
his own person he directly and practically tried out each idea ... his
wife was also a convertee, slightly reluctant, to his tests ... and his
son, perforce. Baxter actually kept a vegetarian dog. "Even carnivorous
animals thrive better on a vegetarian diet." But the dog was no
corroboration of his theory. It lacked gloss and shine to its coat, and
seldom barked.
One afternoon I came upon Dan, Baxter's son, puking in the bushes, not
far from the tents.
"What's the matter, Dan," he turned to me, wan, and serious, and with a
grown-up look on his face.
"Nothing! Only sometimes the warm milk father has me drink makes me
throw up. I'm on a milk diet, you know."
"Does your father know that you can't keep the milk down?"
"Mostly it does stay down ... I guess father's all right," he defended,
"maybe the diet will do me good."
"Do you ever get a beefsteak?"
"Father says meat is no good ... maybe he's right about killing animals.
He says it wouldn't be half so bad if everyone killed their own meat,
instead of making brutes out of men who do the killing for them ... but
it is kind of hard on the dog, though," and the little fellow laughed.
* * * * *
"I think my boy is going to become an engineer of some sort; he's always
playing about with machinery," Penton said to me....
"Suppose you let him take a trip with me to town, then? I'm going to
look through the Best o' Wheat factory this afternoon, and watch how
Best o' Wheat biscuits are made. Perhaps he'd like to see the machinery
working!"
"Johnnie, I'll trust him with you, if you'll promise me not to meddle
with his diet."
"Of course."
"I don't like people stuffing him full of candy and ice cream. I want
to bring him up with a good digestion and sound teeth."
* * * * *
Daniel took my hand as we went through the factory from department to
department. I enjoyed a paternal pride in the handsome, pale,
preternaturally intelligent little fellow.
"Look at the young father!" exclaimed one girl softly to another, with a
touch of pathos in her voice, intimating that perhaps I was a widower.
I blushed with pleasure to the tips of my ears, to be thought the father
of so prepossessing a child.
It delighted him to look into the huge bake ovens where first the wheat
was baked in big brown loaves, before it was broken up into biscuit
form. I thought of Hank Spalton and how he was supposed to have grown
strong on a diet of Best o' Wheat.
It was customary to serve sight-seers, in a dining room kept for that
purpose, with Best o' Wheat and cream, and wheat coffee ... free....
With a little reluctance Dan sat down and ate.
"Hum! that was good; but look here, Buzzer" (that was the nickname he
had invented for me) you mustn't tell Mubby."
"Mubby?"
"That's what mother and I call my father."
"Of course I won't tell him ... and now we must go to a restaurant and
have something real to eat."
"I can't. I don't dare. But I'll sit and watch you eat."