THE reader need not expect this book to contain any nicely adjusted
plot with a villain, hero, lawyer, papers, surprise, and happy ending.
The highway is irrelevant. The highway is slipshod. The highway is as
the necklace of a gipsy or an Indian, a savage string of pebbles and
precious stones, no two alike, with an occasional trumpery suspender
button or peach seed. Every diamond is in the rough.
I was walking between rugged farms on the edge of the oil country in
western Pennsylvania.
The road, almost dry after several days of rain, was gay with
butterfly-haunted puddles. The grotesque swain who gave me a lift in
his automobile for a mile is worth a page, but we will only say that
his photograph would have contributed to the gaiety of nations--that
he was the carved peach-stone on the necklace of the day.
There was a complacent cat in a doorway, that should have been named
“scrambled eggs and milk,” so mongrel was his overcoat. There was a
philosophic grasshopper reading inscriptions in a lonely cemetery, with
whom I had a long and silent interchange of spirit. Even the graveyard
was full of sun.
On and on led the merry morning. At length came noon, and a meal given
with heartiness, as easily plucked as a red apple. For half an hour
after dinner in that big farm-house we sat and talked religion.
O pagan in the cities, the brand of one’s belief is still important
in the hayfield. I was delighted to discover this household held by
conviction to the brotherhood of which I was still a nominal member.
Their lingo was a taste of home. “Our People,” “Our Plea,” “The pious
unimmersed.” Thus did they lead themselves into paths of solemnity.
Then, in the last five minutes of my stay, I gave them my poem-sermon.
The pamphlet made them stare, if it did not make them think.
Splendor after splendor rolled in upon the highway from the four
corners at heaven. Why then should I complain, if about four o’clock
the prosy old world emerged again?
The wagon-track now followed a section of the Pennsylvania railroad,
and railroads are anathema in my eyes when I am afoot. There appeared
no promising way of escape. And now the steel rails led into a region
where there had been rain, even this morning. More than once I had to
take to the ties to go on. When the mud was at all passable I walked in
it by preference, fortifying myself with these philosophizings:--
“Cinders are sterile. They blast man and nature, but the black earth
renews all. Mud upon the shoes is not a contamination but a sign of
progress, eloquent as sweat upon the brow. Who knows but the feet are
the roots of a man? Who knows but rain on the road may help him to
grow? Maybe the stature and breadth of farmers is due to their walking
behind the plough in the damp soil. Only an aviator or a bird has a
right to spurn the ground. All the rest of us must furrow our way. Thus
will our cores be enriched, thus will we give fruit after our kind.”
Whistling pretty hard, I made my way. And now I had to choose between
my rule to flee from the railroad, and my rule to ask for hospitality
before dark.
At length I said to myself: “I want to get into a big unsophisticated
house, the kind that is removed from this railroad. I want to find an
unprejudiced host who will listen with an open mind, and let me talk
him to death.”
To keep this resolve I had to hang on till near eight o’clock. The
cloudy night made the way dim. At length I came to a road that had been
so often graded and dragged it shed water like a turtle’s shell. It
crossed the railway at right angles and ploughed north. I followed it
a mile, shaking the heaviest mud from my shoes. Led by the light of a
lantern, I approached a dim grey farm-house and what would have been in
the daytime a red barn.