THE languid town of Macon, Georgia, will ever remain in my mind as my
first island of respite after vagrancy. My friend C. D. Russell lent
me his clothes, took me to his eating-place, introduced his circle.
We settled the destiny of the universe several different ways in
peripatetic discourse.
After one has ventured one hundred and fifty miles through everglades
and spent twenty-four sleepless hours riding in freight-cabooses the
marrow of his bones is marsh, his hair and clothes are moss, cinders
and bark, his immortal soul is engine-smoke. Feeling just so, I had
entered Russell’s law office. He was at court. I sent word by his
partner that I had gone to school with him in Ohio, that I had mailed
a postal last Sunday from Florida telling him I would arrive afoot
in three weeks,--but here I was, already. The word was carried with
Southern precision.
“There is a person in the office who went to school with you in
Indiana.”
“I did not go to school in Indiana.”
“He has been walking in Mississippi and Alabama. He wrote you a postal
six weeks ago.”
“How does he look?”
“Like the devil. He is principally pants and shirt.”
The cavalier knew who that was. He found me, took me to his castle,
introduced civilization. CIVILIZATION is whiter than the clouds, and
full of clear water. One enters it with a plunge. CULTURE is a fuzzy
fabric with which one rubs in CIVILIZATION. After I had been intimate
with these, I was admitted to SOCIETY: a suit of the cavalier’s
clothes. I looked like him then, all but head and hands. I regarded
myself with awe, as a gorilla would if he found himself fading into a
Gibson picture.
A chair is a sturdy creature. I wonder who captured the first one?
Who put out its eyes and taught it to stand still? A table-cloth
is ritualistic. How nobly the napkin defends the vest, while those
glistening birds, the knife, the fork, the spoon, bring one food.
How did these things to eat get here among these hundreds of houses?
One would think that if anything to eat were brought among so many men,
there would be enough hungry ones to kill each other and spoil it with
blood.
Why do people stop eating when they have had just a bit? Why not go on
forever?
We were in another room. The cavalier showed on the table what he
called his Bible: the letters of Lord Chesterfield. To one who has
not slept in all his life, who has lived a thousand years on freight
trains, books do not count much. But how ingenious is a white iron bed,
how subtle are pillows, how overwhelming is sleep!