Tramping on Life Part 1

Tramping on Life.

by Harry Kemp.

Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.

For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.

I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor country,--but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.

They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready for a flirtation....

My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store, apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he pa.s.sed through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him, not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald ... for he had grown bald very young--at the age of sixteen ... both because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military carriage.

I was four years old when my mother died.

When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few decent acts of his life--he let my father have a farm he owned in central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.

He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for farming.

He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.

Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little more each day.

My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as suddenly.

I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body.

As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me.

She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you would have imagined there was a houseful of people.

My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He had all sorts of adventures, roaming about.

As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,--in the big house which stood back under the trees, aloof from the wide, dusty road that led to the mills.

With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie....

My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write.

And she believed in everybody.

She was stout ... spa.r.s.e-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly, confiding, blue eyes.

Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,--she lent a credulous ear to all,--helped others when we ourselves needed help, signed up for preposterous articles on "easy" monthly payments,--gave away food, starving her appet.i.te and ours.

When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, "well, Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I thought some one was turning you away hungry?"

My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,--he was a man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest methods.

He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his eyes that betrayed his true nature.

Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....

When the Civil War broke out, that streak of adventure and daring in my grandfather which in peace times turned him to shady financial transactions, now caused him to enlist. And before the end of the war he had gone far up in the ranks.

After the war he came into still more money by a manufacturing business which he set up. But the secret process of the special kind of material which he manufactured he inveigled out of a comrade in arms. The latter never derived a cent from it. My grandfather stole the patent, taking it out in his own name. The other man had trusted him, remembering the times they had fought shoulder to shoulder, and had bivouacked together....

My grandfather, though so small as to be almost diminutive, was spry and brave as an aroused wasp when anyone insulted him. Several times he faced down burly-bodied men who had threatened to kill him for his getting the better of them in some doubtful business transaction.

For a long time his meanness and sharp dealings were reserved for outsiders and he was generous with his family. And my sweet, simple, old grandmother belonged to all the societies, charitable and otherwise, in town ... but she was not, never could be "smart." She was always saying and doing nave things from the heart. And soon she began to disapprove of my grandfather's slick business ways.

I don't know just what tricks he put over ... but he became _persona non grata_ in local business circles ... and he took to running about the country, putting through various projects here and there ... this little, dressy, hard-faced man ... like a cross between a weasel and a bird!

He dropped into Mornington, and out again, each time with a wild, restless story of fortunes to be made or in the making!

Once he came home and stayed for a longer time than usual. During this stay he received many letters. My grandmother noticed a furtiveness in his manner when he received them. My grandmother noticed that her husband always repaired immediately to the outhouse when he received a letter.

She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter cast below ... she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out.

She procured a divorce as quietly as possible. Then my grandfather made his final disappearance. I did not see him again till I was quite grown up.

All support of his numerous family ceased. His sons and daughters had to go to work while still children, or marry.

My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a substantial citizen.

My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom, driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my uncle Jim went East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.

The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang used to fight.

After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" ... and after them the "Hunkies"

... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.