Tramping on Life Part 85

"KANSAS POET HONOURED ------------------------ AUTHOR OF 'SLAUGHTER HOUSE' TO VISIT HIM"

I waited in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had written the _Les Miserables_ of the American workingman.

Harry Varden, editor of the _Cry for Right_, had been to Laurel a week previously, to address a socialist local, and I had looked him up, at the house of the "comrade" where he was pa.s.sing the night. The comrade sent me up to Varden's room, where I found the latter just getting out of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the bed-habits of the ma.s.ses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the ma.s.ses, he, too, slept with windows shut.

Varden's monthly magazine _The World to Be_, had occasionally printed a poem of mine ... and I was paid five dollars for each poem.

Varden was a frail, jolly little chap, absolutely fearless and alert and possessed of a keen sense of humour which he could turn, on occasion, even against himself.

I breakfasted with him. He had good table manners, but, from time to time, he forgot himself and smacked his lips keenly. And the egg dripped on his chin as he flashed a humorous incident that had happened to him on one of his lecture trips....

After breakfast he and I took a long walk together ... we began speaking of Penton Baxter ... I spoke in high praise of the great novelist ...

reverently and with awe.

"Yes, yes," Varden a.s.sented, "Penton is all you say, but he has no sense of humour ... and he takes himself and his work as seriously as if the destiny of the human race depended on it ... which is getting in a bad way, for a reformer, you know--gives a chap's enemies and antagonists so many good openings....

"When Penton was writing _The Slaughter House_ and we were running it serially, his protagonist, Jarl--it seemed he didn't know how to dispose of him ... and the book was running on and on interminably.... I wired him 'for G.o.d's sake kill Jarl.' ...

"Baxter took my telegram much to heart ... was deeply aggrieved I afterward learned ... the dear boy ... he did 'kill Jarl' finally ...

and absent-mindedly brought him to life again, later on in his book."

And Harry Varden laughed excitedly like a boy, and he leaned sideways and smote his half-bent, sharp, skinny knee with his left hand. I could perceive that that was a grotesque platform gesture of his, when he drove a comic point home.

I was waiting at the station ... where I had shaken hands with Bob Fitzsimmons, and had seen Emma Silverman off....

Penton Baxter was due on the eleven o'clock train from Kansas City.

I surely must be on the road to becoming somebody, with all these famous people taking such an interest in me. I remembered Emerson's dictum about waiting in one's own doorway long enough, and all the world would come by.

Was I to be disappointed? It did not seem credible that the great man would make a special stop-off on his way to the coast, just to pay me a visit.

One after another the pa.s.sengers stepped down and walked and rode away.

Then a little, boyish-looking man ... smooth-faced, bright-complexioned, jumped down, wavered toward me, dropping his baggage ... extended his hand ... both hands ... smiling with his eyes, that possessed long lashes like a girl's.

"Are you Johnnie Gregory?"

"Penton Baxter?" I asked reverently. He smiled in response and drew my arm through his.

"This is great, this is certainly great," he remarked, in a high voice, "and I'm more than glad that I stopped off to see you."

He expanded in the sun of my youthful hero-worship.

"Where's the best hotel in town?"

"The Bellman House ... but I've arranged with the Sig-Kappas to put you up."

"Are you a fraternity man?"

"No--a barb."

"I'd rather go to the hotel you named ... but thank the boys for me."

I contended with Penton Baxter for the privilege of carrying his two grips. They were so heavy that they dragged my shoulders down, but, with an effort, I threw my chest out, and walked, straight and proud, beside him.

As we walked he questioned and questioned. He had the history of Laurel University, the story of my life, out of me, almost, by the time we had covered the ten blocks to the hotel.

"Penton Baxter!" I whispered in a low voice to the proprietor, who, as he stood behind the desk, dipped the pen with a flourish, and shoved the open register toward his distinguished guest.

Travers, of course, was the first to see the great novelist. He wired an interview to the _Star_, and wrote a story for the Laurel _Globe_ and the _Laurelian_.

Baxter said he would stay over for two days ... that he didn't want to do much beside seeing me ... that he would place himself entirely in my hands. I was beside myself with happy pride.

"This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the South East."

"We call it Azure Mound."

"Has it any historical interest?"

"--don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's company."

Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Sh.e.l.ley as he traipsed along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ...

unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....

His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth was loose and cruel--like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair on an old maid's face.

More than a year later his wife confided to me that "Pennie," as she dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....

Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a rising tide of invisible opposition.

I discoursed of a new religion--a non-ascetic one based on the individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life--that I meditated inaugurating as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His face lit with frolic....

Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.

Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest, Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.

Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how, at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators ... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public office.... "Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his shoes to his hat...."

"Suppose, Mr. President," Baxter had put to him, at the same time expressing his amazement at the president's open manner of speech before men he had never even met before ... men perhaps of antagonistic shades of opinion, "suppose I should go out from here and give to the newspapers the things you have just said! How would you protect, defend yourself?"

"Young man, if you did--_as you won't_--" smashed Roosevelt, with his characteristic of clenched right fist brought down in the open palm of the left hand--"if you did--I'd simply brand you as a liar ... and shame you before the world."