Tramping on Life Part 67

"VAGABOND POET ARRIVES.

LAUREL ENROLLS BOX-CAR STUDENT."

It made me a nine days' wonder with the students. I caught the men staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from cla.s.s room to cla.s.s room....

But the reek of the stable. It went with me like a ghost everywhere.

Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ... I saw that it was noticeable to others, and I sat 'way back, in a seat apart, by myself.

Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.

One afternoon as I was pa.s.sing his house he beckoned me in.

"You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on you as my protege ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the Schiller cla.s.s, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in _Wilhelm Tell_, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too....

And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in cla.s.s for you to translate and construe."

Langworth had only half the truth from King.

Whenever the latter came upon a pa.s.sage a little off colour, he put me on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it without hesitation.

About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of the New York _Independent_. He informed me that he had taken a poem of mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.

Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the _Independent_.

I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with me wherever I went.

Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.

The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.

They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ...

and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the dam....

At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to teach.

Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded into a festering mult.i.tude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of low-lying country. This place was known as the "Bottoms."

I am trying to give you the flavour of the town.

They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power ... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a concomitant prost.i.tution of coloured women and girls throve. One or two students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they were fond....

The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus frumenti--for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble," which seemed to be prevalent and epidemic throughout the community.

Sat.u.r.day was market day for the farmers who lived in the adjoining countryside ... and the livery stables where they put up their horses were also resorts for gambling and the selling of "bootleg" booze....

These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.

There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their trade ... "a square meal for a quarter" ... and a square meal they served ... mult.i.tudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee. Where these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little bootlegging on the side.

It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job. The same one where I had spent my first night in town.

Langworth sent for me one day.

"I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I considered I ought to see you about it."

I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I pa.s.sed a lot of time about the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their farms in the hills and spent Sat.u.r.days and Sundays there. I avowed that there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored professors and students.

My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to me the proverb of "birds of a feather."

Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been barren of fruit.

"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs, querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.

"Laddie has just died."

"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.

"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was." There was an acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she wanted her husband to send me away.

"She wants you to go," whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a sick child. He escorted me into the storm porch. "You have no idea," he apologised defensively, "how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you can become...."

"What's this?" I asked, taken aback. He had thrust a check into my hand as he shook hands good-bye.

"It's a check I've just endorsed over to you. Royalties on a recent text-book. Please do take it." I had intimated that I would probably be compelled to quit college and go on the tramp again ... confessing frankly, also, that a stationary life got on my nerves at times.

"I want you to keep on, not go back to the tramp life ... we'll make something of you yet," he jested, diffidently, steering me off when he noticed that I was about to heap profuse thanks on him.

"How can I ever thank you--"

"By studying hard and making good. By becoming the great poet I wanted to be."

"But how can I pay this back? It will take a long time--"

"When you arrive at the place where you can afford to pay me back, pa.s.s it on to someone else who is struggling as you are now, and as I myself have struggled."