I found a camp of tramps and joined with them. We drank coffee
together....
But, somehow, the scales had fallen from my eyes. My old idealisation of
the life of the tramp, somehow or other, was entirely gone--an
idealisation that had, anyhow, been mainly literary, induced by the
writings of Jack London, Josiah Flynt and Maxim Gorky.
Now, as I listened to their filthy talk ... their continual
"Jesus-Christ'-ing" over everything they said, I grew sick of them. I
got up and walked away stiffly--never again to be a tramp.
The reporter of the _Star_, who covered the stockyards, took me to a
little sturdy cattle merchant, who agreed to ship me to New York, in
care of five carloads of calves ... for a fee of ten dollars. I
persuaded him that I would mail him that ten on arrival at my point of
destination ... I have never done so ... when I had it, I needed it more
for myself ... and, anyhow, I earned that ten.
* * * * *
My duties with the calves were not many ... merely to walk along the
sides of the five cars in my keeping, and see that the calves kept on
their legs and did not sprawl over each other ... sometimes one of them
would get crushed against the side of the car, and his leg would
protrude through the slats. And I would push his leg back, to keep it
from being broken ... I made my rounds every time the freight came to a
halt.
There were other cars, filled with steers, sheep, and pigs.
Each kind of animal behaved according to its nature, during the trip.
The steers soon accepted their cramped, moving life rather stolidly. The
calves acted as if dumbfounded, in stupefied, wide-eyed innocence ...
the sheep huddled as sheep do ... but the big fat porkers were the most
intelligent ... like intelligent cowards that fully know their fate,
they piled in heaping, screaming, frenzied masses ... in scrambling
heaps in the centre of their cars ... suffocating, stinking, struggling
closer and closer together and leaving great, bare areas unoccupied on
either end....
"A pig has no sense in a car ... or anywhere."
"Seems to me they have ... they act as if they know what they're in for,
at the other end of the line."
"By golly, that's true! I never thought of it that way before!"
So conversed the head brakeman and I.
My calves soon grew to know me. They bleated, in a friendly manner, as I
walked by, overseeing them, when the freight stopped.
* * * * *
We had bumped along as far as Buffalo. There the stock were driven down
an incline into yards fenced in with white-washed boards, for their
second rest, required by law,--before launching on the last leg of their
journey down the middle of New York State, and along the Hudson ...
consigned to Stern and Company of New York....
Some of them were to be butchered there and afford apartment-dwellers
lamb stew, tenderloins, and pork chops ... others to be driven aboard
cattleboats, for Europe....
* * * * *
At Buffalo I was ripe for a change. Also I wished to pick up threads of
former experiences and acquaintanceships ... to have a good gossip about
the Eos Art Community ... I called up Laston Meunier who had been at Eos
and whom I had first met there ... who loved bohemian ways, and welcomed
wandering artistic and literary folk at his home in Buffalo.
"Where are you now?" Laston asked, over the phone.
"I'm calling you from the stockyards," and I told him what I was
doing....
"Come on up to my house, and forget your five carloads of calves ...
they can weather through the last jump, to New York, alone ... what does
it matter?... they're going to be butchered in a few days."
Looking about this way and that, to make sure I was unseen, I took my
grip in my hand, hopped aboard a street car outside the stockyards, and
abandoned my calves to their destiny.
Meunier welcomed me. He invited me to stay at his house for several
weeks. His pretty, young wife, smiling whimsically, showed me to a room
she had already set in dainty order for me.
* * * * *
Meunier had gone to his office....
Nichi Swartzman, the tall Japanese genius, showed up, and Bella Meunier,
Nichi, and I ate breakfast together.
Swartzman was, and is, a magnificent talker ... a torch of inspiration
burned brightly in his brain, with continual conversational fire.
But he must have his drink. Several of them. Which Laston's wife poured
for him abundantly.
After breakfast I sprawled on the floor ... I always sprawl on floors
instead of sitting in chairs....
Swartzman and Bella Meunier and I talked and talked and talked ... of
Poe ... of Baudelaire, of Balzac....
Then Nichi launched forth on a long disquisition on Japanese and Chinese
art, and Mrs. Meunier and I gladly remained silent during the whole
morning, enchanted by the vistas of beauty which Swartzman's words
opened for us.
"Why," I thought, "must such a man lack audiences? If civilisation were
in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and
lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is _alive_. His fire wakes
kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching to the
corpse-minded, the dead-hearted? like so many of our professors and
teachers!"
I found out afterward that Nichi Swartzman was utterly irresponsible as
he was brilliant.
* * * * *
Laston Meunier dug up poor old Fritz Von Hammer, the former Eos
pianist--whose breath was still as fetid as ever ... who still insisted
on seizing you by the coat lapel and talking right into your nose--dug
him up from the moving picture house, where he played.
Von Hammer wept over the piano, as he found himself free again to play
as he wished....
The party was in my honour. There were present about a dozen guests,
picked from Buffalo's bohemia. They sat about on the floor on cushions.
Swartzman recited Poe's Black Cat, with gestures and facial contortions
that were terrifying. His huge, yellow, angular Japanese face grimacing
near the ceiling ... he was six foot six, if anything....
His recitation was done so well that, when he had finished, we sat, for
a moment, in frightened silence, like children. Then we stormed him with
applause.
"Now play the Danse Macabre," cried Nichi, to Von Hammer....
"I can't do it without a violin accompaniment."
"Try it for me ... and I shall dance the Dance of Death for you."
Von Hammer said he would do his best ... after much persuasion and a few
more drinks....
And Nichi Swartzman danced....
We saw, though we did not know it, the origin of modern futurist dancing
there. Nichi danced with his street clothes on ... wearing his hat, in
ghoulish rakishness, tipped down over his eyes ... inter-wreathing his
cane with his long, skeletal, twisting legs and arms ... his eyes
gleaming cat-like through merest slits....
At three o'clock in the morning we were all drunk. Before we parted we
joined in singing shakily but enthusiastically _Down in Bohemia Land_.
* * * * *
Meunier, fulfilling his promise to me, paid my fare to New York. I soon
walked into the office of the _National Magazine_.
Clara Martin was there, and Allsworth Lephil, the managing editor, and
his assistant Galusha Siddon.
As I sat in the office, they gave me a sort of impromptu reception.
Ray Sanford strolled in, as fresh-complexioned as an Englishman. He was,
they said, preparing a series of articles on the negro problem. And I
met a little, bustling, sharp-eyed man, with much of the feminine about
him,--his face lifted as if on an intuitive intellectual scent....
Carruthers Heflin ... he wore a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard,
like a stage-doctor. He was busy with a series of articles to be
entitled, _Babylons of To-day_ ... exposing the corruption of our modern
American cities.