_Walking into Kansas_
It has been raining quite a little. The roads are so muddy I have to
walk the ties. Keeping company with the railroad is almost a habit.
While this shower passes I write in the station at Stillwell, Kansas.
JUNE 14, 1912. I have crossed the mystic border. I have left Earth. I
have entered Wonderland. Though I am still east of the geographical
centre of the United States, in every spiritual sense I am in the
West. This morning I passed the stone mile-post that marks the
beginning of Kansas.
I went over the border and encountered--what do you think? Wild
strawberries! Lo, where the farmer had cut the weeds between the road
and the fence, the gentle fruits revealed themselves, growing in the
shadow down between the still-standing weeds. They shine out in a red
line that stretches on and on, and a man has to resolve to stop eating
several times. Just as he thinks he has conquered desire the line gets
dazzlingly red again.
The berries grow at the end of a slender stalk, clustered six in a
bunch. One gathers them by the stems, in bouquets, as it were, and
eats off the fruit like taffy off a stick.
I was gathering buckets of cherries for a farmer's wife yesterday.
This morning after the strawberries had mitigated I encountered a bush
of raspberries, and then hedges on hedges of mulberries both white and
red. The white mulberries are the sweetest. If this is the wild West,
give me more. There are many varieties of trees, and they are thick as
in the East. The people seem to grow more cordial. I was eating
mulberries outside the yard of a villager. He asked me in where the
eating was better. And then he told me the town scandal, while I had
my dessert.
A day or so ago I hoed corn all morning for my dinner. This I did
cheerfully, considering I had been given a good breakfast at that farm
for nothing. I feel that two good meals are worth about a morning's
work anyway. And then I had company. The elderly owner of the place
hoed along with me. He saved the country, by preaching to me the old
fashioned high tariff gospel, and I saved it by preaching to him the
new fashioned Gospel of Beauty. Meanwhile the corn was hoed. Then we
went in and ate the grandest of dinners. That house was notable for
having on its walls really artistic pictures, not merely respectable
pictures, nor yet seed-catalogue advertisements.
That night, in passing through a village, I glimpsed a man washing his
dishes in the rear of a blacksmith shop. I said to myself: "Ah ha!
Somebody keeping bach."
I knew I was welcome. There is no fear of the stranger in such a
place, for there are no ladies to reassure or propitiate. Permission
to sleep on the floor was granted as soon as asked. I spread out _The
Kansas City Star_, which is a clean sheet, put my verses under my head
for a pillow and was content. Next morning the sun was in my eyes.
There was the odor of good fried bacon in the air.
"Git up and eat a snack, pardner," said my friend the blacksmith. And
while I ate he told me the story of his life.
I had an amusing experience at the town of Belton. I had given an
entertainment at the hotel on the promise of a night's lodging. I
slept late. Over my transom came the breakfast-table talk. "That was a
hot entertainment that young bum gave us last night," said one man.
"He ought to get to work, the dirty lazy loafer," said another.
The schoolmaster spoke up in an effort not to condescend to his
audience: "He is evidently a fraud. I talked to him a long time after
the entertainment. The pieces he recited were certainly not his own. I
have read some of them somewhere. It is too easy a way to get along,
especially when the man is as able to work as this one. Of course in
the old days literary men used to be obliged to do such things. But it
isn't at all necessary in the Twentieth Century. Real poets are highly
paid." Another spoke up: "I don't mind a fake, but he is a rotten
reciter, anyhow. If he had said one more I would have just walked
right out. You noticed ol' Mis' Smith went home after that piece about
the worms." Then came the landlord's voice: "After the show was over I
came pretty near not letting him have his room. All I've got to say is
he don't get any breakfast."
I dressed, opened the doorway serenely, and strolled past the table,
smiling with all the ease of a minister at his own church-social. In
my most ornate manner I thanked the landlord and landlady for their
extreme kindness. I assumed that not one of the gentle-folk had
intended to have me hear their analysis. 'Twas a grand exit. Yet, in
plain language, these people "got my goat." I have struggled with
myself all morning, almost on the point of ordering a marked copy of a
magazine sent to that smart schoolmaster. "_Evidently a fraud!_"
Indeed!
"Goin' wes' harvesin'?"
"Yes, yes. I think I will harvest when I get to Great Bend."
JUNE 18, 1912. Approaching Emporia. I am sitting in the hot sun by the
Santa Fé tracks, after two days of walking those tracks in the rain. I
am near a queer little Mexican house built of old railroad ties.
I had had two sticks of candy begged from a grocer for breakfast. I
was keeping warm by walking fast. Because of the muddy roads and the
sheets of rain coming down it was impossible to leave the tracks. It
was almost impossible to make speed since the ballast underfoot was
almost all of it big rattling broken stone. I had walked that Santa Fé
railroad a day and a half in the drizzle and downpour. It was a little
past noon, and my scanty inner fuel was almost used up. I dared not
stop a minute now, lest I catch cold. There was no station in sight
ahead. When the mists lifted I saw that the tracks went on and on,
straight west to the crack of doom, not even a water-tank in sight.
The mists came down, then lifted once more, and, as though I were
Childe Roland, I suddenly saw a shack to the right, in dimensions
about seven feet each way. It was mostly stove-pipe, and that pipe was
pouring out enough smoke to make three of Aladdin's Jinns. I presume
some one heard me whistling. The little door opened. Two period heads
popped out, "Come in, you slab-sided hobo," they yelled
affectionately. "Come in and get dry." And so my heart was made
suddenly light after a day and a half of hard whistling.
At the inside end of that busy smoke-stack was a roaring redhot stove
about as big as a hat. It had just room enough on top for three
steaming coffee cans at a time. There were four white men with their
chins on their knees completely occupying the floor of one side of the
mansion, and four Mexicans filled the other. Every man was hunched up
to take as little room as possible. It appeared that my only chance
was to move the tins and sit on the stove. But one Mexican sort of sat
on another Mexican and the new white man was accommodated. These
fellows were a double-section gang, for the track is double all along
here.
I dried out pretty quick. The men began to pass up the coffee off the
stove. It strangled and blistered me, it was so hot. The men were
almost to the bottom of the food sections of their buckets and were
beginning to throw perfectly good sandwiches and extra pieces of pie
through the door. I said that if any man had anything to throw away
would he just wait till I stepped outside so I could catch it. They
handed me all I could ever imagine a man eating. It rained and rained
and rained, and I ate till I could eat no more. One man gave me for
dessert the last half of his cup of stewed raisins along with his own
spoon. Good raisins they were, too. A Mexican urged upon me some brown
paper and cigarette tobacco. I was sorry I did not smoke. The men
passed up more and more hot coffee.
That coffee made me into a sort of thermos bottle. On the strength of
it I walked all afternoon through sheets and cataracts. When dark came
I slept in wet clothes in a damp blanket in the hay of a windy livery
stable without catching cold.
Now it is morning. The sky is reasonably clear, the weather is
reasonably warm, but I am no longer a thermos bottle, no, no. I am
sitting on the hottest rock I can find, letting the sun go through my
bones. The coffee in me has turned at last to ice and snow. Emporia,
the Athens of America, is just ahead. Oh, for a hot bath and a clean
shirt!
A mad dog tried to bite me yesterday morning, when I made a feeble
attempt to leave the track. When I was once back on the ties, he
seemed afraid and would not come closer. His bark was the ghastliest
thing I ever heard. As for his bite, he did not get quite through my
shoe-heel.
EMPORIA, KANSAS, JUNE 19, 1912. On inquiring at the Emporia General
Delivery for mail, I found your letter telling me to call upon your
friend Professor Kerr. He took my sudden appearance most kindly, and
pardoned my battered attire and the mud to the knees. After a day in
his house I am ready to go on, dry and feasted and warm and clean. The
professor's help seemed to come in just in time. I was a most weary
creature.
Thinking it over this morning, the bathtub appears to be the first
outstanding advantage the cultured man has over the half-civilized.
Quite often the folk with swept houses and decent cooking who have
given my poems discriminating attention, who have given me good things
to eat, forget, even when they entertain him overnight, that the
stranger would like to soak himself thoroughly. Many of the working
people seem to keep fairly clean with the washpan as their principal
ally. But the tub is indispensable to the mendicant in the end, unless
he is walking through a land of crystal waterfalls, like North
Georgia.
I am an artificial creature at last, dependent, after all, upon modern
plumbing. 'Tis, perhaps, not a dignified theme, but I retired to the
professor's bathroom and washed off the entire State of Missouri and
the eastern counties of Kansas, and did a deal of laundry work on the
sly. This last was not openly confessed to the professor, but he might
have guessed, I was so cold on the front porch that night.
I shall not soon lose the memory of this the first day of emergence
from the strait paths of St. Francis, this first meeting, since I left
Springfield, with a person on whom I had a conventional social claim.
I had forgotten what the delicacy of a cultured welcome would be like.
The professor's table was a marvel to me. I was astonished to discover
there were such fine distinctions in food and linen. And for all my
troubadour profession, I had almost forgotten there were such
distinctions in books. I have hardly seen one magazine since I left
you. The world where I have been moving reads nothing but newspapers.
It is confusing to bob from one world to the other, to zig-zag across
the social dead-line. I sat in the professor's library a very mixed-up
person, feeling I could hardly stay a minute, yet too heavy-footed to
stir an inch, and immensely grateful and relaxed.
Sooner or later I am going to step up into the rarefied civilized air
once too often and stay there in spite of myself. I shall get a little
too fond of the china and old silver, and forget the fields. Books and
teacups and high-brow conversations are awfully insinuating things, if
you give them time to be. One gets along somehow, and pleasure
alternates with pain, and the sum is the joy of life, while one is
below. But to quit is like coming up to earth after deep-sea diving in
a heavy suit. One scarcely realizes he has been under heavier-than-air
pressure, and has been fighting off great forces, till he has taken
off his diving helmet, as it were. And yet there is a baffling sense
of futility in the restful upper air. I remember it once, long ago, in
emerging in Warren, Ohio, and once in emerging in Macon, Georgia:--the
feeling that the upper world is all tissue paper, that the only
choice a real man can make is to stay below with the great forces of
life forever, even though he be a tramp--the feeling that, to be a
little civilized, we sacrifice enormous powers and joys. For all I was
so tired and so very grateful to the professor, I felt like a bull in
a china shop. I should have been out in the fields, eating grass.