Tramping on Life Part 62

"Come right into the back. Breasted, the boss, is out for the day....

I'm having my lunch sent in, won't you have some with me?"

He acted just as if he hadn't noticed my dilapidation.

I said I'd gladly share his lunch.

He drew my story out of me,--the story of my life, in fact, before the afternoon wore to dusk.

"Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked him.

"No ... far from it ... " adding gently, with a smile, "sometimes an awful fool, though, Johnnie--if I may say it."

"Won't you stay overnight?"

"No, thanks just the same, 'Perfesser.'"

"I have room enough ... better hang around a few days and look for a job here."

"It's too near Haberford."

"But I know you'd take a couple of fresh books, if I gave them to you, now wouldn't you?"

My eyes lit up as with hunger.

"This Milton and Sterne are too used-up to be worth a nickel a-piece.

Maybe, if I'd keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when you're famous," he joked.

"If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and this Ossian? I want the Keats for myself. It will renew my courage.

And--the Ossian--will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old Pfeiler?"

I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both.

Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he grew to hate me.

Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly of me.

I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not caring to write a line myself.

I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston, and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.

I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as the poet Gray lived his.

I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where Emerson and Th.o.r.eau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts of Th.o.r.eau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.

Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....

On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup of excellent, hot, strong coffee.

Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.

The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.

It was hardly dawn when he woke me....

A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his wife was with us, working, too.

When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence.

He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His whole life and pleasure was senseless work.

And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the old religious cla.s.sics. Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, Baxter's _Saint's Rest_, Blair, _On the Grave_ ... Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance--Keats had read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of doom and the tortures of h.e.l.l made his auditors faint ... I thought back to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas jail.

But now old Sowerby read nothing. "I have no time left for a book."

I never met the old man's equal for parsimony. "The last man--the man who worked for me before you came--he was a Pole, who could hardly speak English. He left because he didn't like the food ... yes, that was what he had the impudence to announce ... and you can see that I am not so bad ... don't I give you a slice of jelly roll with your beans, every other night?"

I a.s.sented to what the old man said. He had been the milkman to the Emerson and Th.o.r.eau families, and, in that capacity, had known both the great men. And I was more eager to hear what he had to say about them, than to draw wages for my work.

But he had little to say about them, except that they were as great fools as the outside world esteemed them great men.

"They talked a lot about work and a man's being independent, earning his living with his own hands, from the soil, but,--did they follow their teachings?... that's the test....

"And I saw them, often, strolling out a-field together, talking and talking a lot of nonsense about philosophy, and going on, regardless, across their neighbours' crops."

And that was the only information I could get of these famous men from their milkman.

Sowerby kept pigs under the barn.... For economy's sake the cows' dung was shovelled down to them. And over them the outhouse was also built, so that our human efforts might not be wasted....

One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight.

On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the plain disgust of the horses and cows.

I asked him if anything was the matter. I learned that he had risen in the middle of the night and gone to work ... because that was his happiness, his only happiness.