Tramping on Life Part 66

While at Mt. Hebron I had chosen German as my modern language. And it was a Professor Langworth's grammar and exercise book that we used as a text-book. Langworth, I learned from the t.i.tle page, was professor of Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.

And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be less appallingly machine-like.

The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar's office) overwhelmed me with their number. And I fled. With the exception of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode a freight further to Laurel.

In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards at Laurel....

I enquired my way to the university.

"Up on the hill."

I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud, over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....

The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.

One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights. As I stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor Langworth's house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished t.i.ttering when they saw me. And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from my long ride.

I asked them the direction to Langworth's house, but they ignored me, and scattered. Turning in confusion, I ran into a man-student bodily ...

excused myself ... the girls, standing further off, t.i.ttered again.

"Can you direct me to Professor Gustav Langworth's house?"

The student looked me over curiously. But he was of the right sort.

"Certainly. Come with me. I'm going that way. I'll show you where it is...."

In silence we descended the hill....

"That house, in there a bit, under the trees ... that is where the professor lives."

My knock set a dog barking inside ... the quick, insistent bark of a collie that romped against me, putting up its paws on me when the door was opened by a slim-bodied man of middle height. The man was dressed in a grey suit ... he had a kindly, smooth-shaven face except for a close-cropped pepper-and-salt moustache ... and grey-blue, quizzical, but kindly eyes.

"Here, Laddie, come here!" called the voice of a frail, little woman whose hair was white like wool, and like wool in texture. She sat crumpled up by an open gas fire of imitation logs. She Was wry-backed, her right shoulder thrust out into a discernible hunch.

She flung her arm tenderly about the dog, when it came to her. She was, I figured, the professor's mother.... He held a hurried, whispered consultation with her--after I had told him that studying his German book at Mt. Hebron had impelled me to come to Laurel. Which story I could see pleased and flattered him.

I was waiting in the storm porch.

He returned. He thrust his hand into his pocket and fetched forth a two-dollar bill.

"Go downtown to one of the restaurants you will find on the main street.

You can get a square meal in one of them for a quarter or, at the most, fifty cents ... a bed for the same price ... climb the hill again in the morning, say about ten o'clock, and ask for me at the German Department ... I am sorry I can't invite you to stay here for the night ... but we have no room ..." and he glanced timidly at the woman whom I had taken to be his mother, but who, I afterward learned, was his wife.

I found a restaurant-hotel, as he had directed me, and procured my supper for a quarter ... fried potatoes and a cold slab of steak ... and a big Westerner who wore a sombrero and had a stupid, kindly, boyish face, showed me to a bed ... which also cost but a quarter for the night ... with a scattered ambuscade of bedbugs thrown in for good measure.

In the morning, fried pork chops, pancakes and two cups of coffee--and I set out for the hill.

The place buzzed with activity. The fall term was already in full swing, and students poured in lines up and down both sides of the steep street that led to the college ... girls and boys both, for it was co-educational. They were well dressed and jolly, as they moved in the keen windy sun of autumn.

I was not a part of this. I felt like an outcast, but I bore myself with a.s.sumed independence and indifference. I thought everybody was looking at me. Most of them were.

Langworth enrolled me as a special student. He himself paid my tuition fee, which was a nominal one. I enrolled in Philosophy, Economics, German, Latin.

My patron, furthermore, slipped a ten-dollar bill into my hand. "For the books you will need."

He directed me to the Y.M.C.A. employment bureau. "They will see that you get work at something, so you can be sure of board and room ... in the early days we did not have things so well arranged. I worked my way through college, too. I nearly perished, my first year. After you settle somewhere, come and see me once in a while and let me hear how you're getting on."

My first job was milking a cow and taking care of a horse, for board and room.... The man for whom I worked was an old, retired farmer.

The disagreeable part of taking care of horses and cows is the smell. My clothes, my room, even the skin of my body, soon reeked with the faint yet penetrating odour of stable and barn.

But I was happy. Many great men had done as I was doing. Always trust me to dramatise every situation!

I arranged my meagre row of text-books on the shelf in my attic. I set Keats apart in a sacred nook by himself.

I sat humming softly to myself, studying my first lessons.

"Look," cried a girl, her voice vibrating with the hard sarcasm of youth, "look, there goes Abe Lincoln," to another girl and two boys, who lolled with her on the porch of the house next mine.

I was stabbed with a bitter pang of resentment. For my face was thin and weather-beaten ... my sharp, bent knees never straightened as I walked along, like a man going through snow drifts. Yet I held my head erect, ridiculously erect ... and my chest was enormous through over-development, as my arms and legs were thin.

My first few days at Laurel University brought me that beginning of newspaper notoriety that has since followed me everywhere as a shadow goes with a moving object. And then originated the appellation which has since clung to me, that of "The Vagabond Poet."

One morning, when I was hardly awake, there came a knock at my door.

"Just a moment," I called, getting into my shirt and trousers, "who is it?"

"A reporter to interview you."

I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he represented the Kansas City _Star_. As he spoke his keen grey eyes looked me over impartially, but with intelligent, friendly interest.

Though he was dressed in the student's conventional style, even to the curiously nicked and clipped soft hat then predominant, there was still about him an off-handedness, an impudent at-homeness that bespoke a wider knowledge, or a.s.sumed knowledge, of the world, than the average student possesses.

The interview appeared the next afternoon.