Tramping on Life Part 72

"Uncle Bill Struthers is an example of what Kansas can do for a man...."

said Mackworth, when we were alone. "Bill, in the old days, was a sort of tramp printer ... clever, but with all his ability in him unexpressed ... he was always down and out ... and drink! It verged on dipsomania.

He never held a job long ... though he was a good compositor, he was always on the move from place to place....

"Then he came to Kansas where we have prohibition ... and it has panned out in Uncle Bill's case pretty fine.

"He came to work for me ... fell by chance into his prose-poetry vein.

It took; was instantly copied in all the newspapers ... of course, I could do it as well, or anyone else with a rhyming turn ... but he was the originator ... and people liked his st.u.r.dy common sense, his wholesome optimism.

"Now Bill is happy; his stuff's syndicated--in thousands of households wherever English is spoken his name is a familiar word. He gives whole communities strength to go on with the common duties of life."

"And his drinking?"

"He has conquered that entirely ... once every so often the fit comes over him--the craving for it--then, when Uncle Bill turns up missing, as the Irishman puts it, none of us worries....

"We all know he has. .h.i.tched up his horse and buggy and is off, driving and driving and driving across country, to work the fit out ... no, he never touches anything stronger than tobacco and coffee now....

"In a few days he comes back ... no one says a word ... we all know ...

and love and respect him....

"He's happy now, is Uncle Bill ... married a young wife ... has a home all his own ... money piling up in the bank."

Ally Merton smiled quizzically when I spoke of Uncle Bill to him....

"Yes, Uncle Bill's a fine, quaint old chap ... whenever he has a tiff with his wife--of course, never anything serious--he locks himself in the kitchen ... closes all the windows ... smokes up terrifically with his corncob ... and plays and plays for hours on end ... his Red Seal records of cla.s.sical music of which he is so fond.

"This behaviour of his is a well-known joke among us, a joke with his wife, to!" ... the speaker paused, to continue--

"He has a good library and quite a large knowledge of the English poets."

"That makes it all the more terrible," I replied, "for if he wrote his verse-prose out of ignorance, he might be somewhat forgiven ... but he knows better."

I gave a lecture on Keats to a woman's club. They paid me thirty dollars for the lecture....

"Well, you surely made a killing ... those old birds will worship you for life," sn.i.g.g.e.red Ally.

Mackworth and I had a farewell talk before I returned to Laurel. We stood again in front of his office, on the sunny street ... he had come out to bid me good-bye.

We talked of the folk poetry of America.... Mackworth recited to me several of the songs and ballads which I have since seen in Lomax's book of Cowboy Songs.... I repeated the tale of how I had collected the jail-songs that I subsequently lost while jumping a freight....

"There's lots of poetry in American life ... Stephen Foster Collins scratched the surface of it ... but he was a song writer....

"There's poetry on farm, ranch, in small town, big city, all waiting for the trans.m.u.ting touch of the true singer ... not newspaper rhymes ...

neither the stock effusions on Night, Love, Death and Immortality inserted as tail-piece to stories and articles in magazines....

"There's the negro mind ...--ought to hear them sing, making up songs as they load and unload boats along the Mississippi ... n.o.body's ever dug back into the black mind yet--why don't you do these things?"...

"Good-bye, Mister Mackworth--I've had a fine time!"

"Good-bye, my boy ... be a good boy ... G.o.d bless you!"

At the Harvey Eating House the manager brought me out a cardboard box neatly packed, full of all manner of good things to eat....

"Good-bye, Ally! thanks for your hospitality, Ally! thank your folks for me again!"

"I will. See you up at Laurel some day soon!"

For Merton was coming to study there, in the fall.

Back in Laurel I resumed my studies again in my intense though haphazard way. Doctors' degrees and graduation certificates did not interest me. I meditated no career in which such credentials would stand me in stead.

But the meat and substance of what the world had achieved, written, thought--it was this that I sought to learn and know.

Already the professors were beginning to row about me and report me for cutting recitations. On the score of my scholarship and my knowing my subject they had no complaint. It was that I disrupted their cla.s.ses and made for lax discipline.

But I seldom cut cla.s.s deliberately.... I would find myself lost in a book back in the "stack" as the big room that housed the tiers of books was called. The day would be dusking, the lights of evening glimmering below in town, to my bewildered eyes! The day gone, when I had stepped back among the books at nine o'clock, intending to while away a half hour between cla.s.ses! (Once it was Sidney's Arcadia that entranced me so).

Or I would set out for cla.s.s ... hatless ... my hair tousled and long ... in my sandals that were mocked at by my colleagues ... my books under arm ... and fall into a reverie that would fetch me up, two miles or so away, a-stray up a by-road flanked with a farmhouse and young cornfields.

Then it would be too late for my schoolday, and I would make a day of it ... would perhaps get acquainted with some farmer and his family, have dinner and supper at his house, and swap yarns with him and the rest of his people.

Jack Travers was as proud of my foot-trip to Osageville as if he had accomplished it himself.

"The boys out at the Sig-Kappa house expect three or four kegs of beer in from Kansas City ... come on out and help us to celebrate."

"But I don't drink."

"Go on! you've told me about the time you did what you called 'slopping up' down in Texas!"

"That was only once ... and since then I've become a physical culturist."

"Well, come and join the party anyhow ... it won't hurt you to look on."