Tramping on Life Part 88

I stop at Topeka and visit Dad Rother ... a columnist on a newspaper there, of more than local fame ... an obviously honest-to-G.o.d bachelor ... he is afflicted with dandruff and his hair is almost gone. He shows me photographs of Mackworth and of Uncle Bill Struthers, each autographed with accompanying homely sentiment.

I catch myself pretending an interest in Rother's column, but really actuated by a desire to plant myself in his mind, and to have a notice in his paper about me ... anything that Dad Rother has in his column is copied in all the Kansas papers.

I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the use of a typewriter.

But the stick or so put in the paper about my pa.s.sing through Leavenworth pleases me.

General Fred Furniss is stationed at Fort Leavenworth. I must visit him.

General Furniss walked in rapidly as if executing a military manoevour, both hands held forth in welcome. He was "Napoleonic" in size, and, also like Napoleon, he carried too much belly in front of him. He wore a closely curling salt-and-pepper beard....

He commented on my "military carriage"--asked me if I had ever gone to a military academy....

I yielded to an instinct for deprecative horse-play, one of my worst faults, begot of an inferiority-complex.

"No, I've never gone to a military academy, but I've had a hole in the seat of my pants so generally, and I have had to walk erect so much to keep my coat tail well down to hide it, that that is where I acquired my military carriage."

The general's eyes twinkled.

"Take a chair. I have heard of you, Mr. Gregory ... I have watched your work, too. Roosevelt knows about it ... has spoken of it to me ... has remarked: 'there's a young fellow--your poet-chap in Kansas--that will be worth watching ... why is it, Fred, that every man of any talent whatever in Kansas, instantly gets the eye of the nation?... we're always expecting something big from William Allen White's State'."

A week or so of work for a Polish-Catholic farmer ... who locked me out of his house, when he and his family went to ma.s.s the one Sunday I was with him. He asked me if I wanted a book to read. As the only book he possessed was Thomas a Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_, I took it, and learned Christian humility, reading it, in the orchard. Surely this farmer was a practical Christian. He believed in his fellow man and at the same time gave him no opportunity to abuse his faith in him....

It was pleasant, this working for from a few days to a week, then sauntering on ... putting up at cheap little country hotels overnight. I liked it better than tramping....

I pitched hay, I loaded lumber, I dug, I planted, I reaped.

In lower Minnesota a Swedish emigrant farmer hired me to help him with his hay crop. He and I and his lanky son, Julius ... just coming out of adolescence ... we worked away from sun-up till moon-rise....

The first day I congratulated myself for working for that particular farmer. The meat at table was abundant and fresh.

But before my two weeks were up I had grown weary of the diet. They had killed a cow ... and cow-meat was what I found set before me morning, noon, and night,--every day. I complained about it to Julius ... "when we kill a cow ain't we got to eat it?" he replied.

Every afternoon we partic.i.p.ated in a pleasant Swedish custom. The two women of the household, the mother and grandmother, with blue cloth rolled about their head for headgear, brought us coffee and cake a-field....

"Aeftermittagscaffee," they called it.

It refreshed us; we worked on after that till late supper by lamp, driving back to the house by moonlight.

At Duluth I found that a strike prevailed on the Lakes. I was held in doubt whether I ought to sail, for I would have to do so as strike-breaker, which was against my radical code ... but, then, I had come over-land all the way from Laurel, to voyage the Great Lakes for the poetry to be found there ... and I must put my muse above such things as strikes.

I signed on, on a big ore boat, as porter....

That means, as third cook; my task the washing and scouring of greasy pots, pans, and dishes ... and waiting on the firemen and deckhands at meals.

The _James Eads Howe_ took on a cargo of rust-coloured iron ore at Twin Harbours ... the gigantic machinery grided and crashed all night, pouring the ore into the hold, to the dazzling flare of electric lights....

Here for the first time I conceived myself to be caught in the great industrial turmoil. If I were to derive song from this, it would be song for giants, or rather, for machines that had grown to gigantic proportions from the insect world ... diminutive men made parts of their anatomy as they swung levers and operated cranes....

We kicked outward on the long drop down Lake Superior, the largest of the five Great Lakes. It was like an inland ocean. The water of it is always so cold that, when a ship is wrecked there, good swimmers who might otherwise keep up till rescued, often perish of the cold....

Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the water to escape the flames....

And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down, a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....

"That's a reflection of some real city," explained the tall Canadian-Scotch cook ... "once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky ...--thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving."

Half-way across to the Soo Ca.n.a.l we ran into my first lake-storm.

"The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor.

He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land on every side."

Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears, and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic clang of coal as it shot from shovels....

The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.

I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars ... greeting with oaths and comic curses the awkward coal pa.s.ser who spilled with his laden wheelbarrow into the slightly lower pit where they stood.

I quit the _James Eads Howe_ at Ashtabula, after several round trips in her, the length of the Lakes.

I freighted it to Chicago, where I shipped, again as porter, on a package freighter.

The captain of the package freighter _Overland_ should have been anything but a captain. He was a tall, flabby, dough-faced man, as timid as a child just out of the nursery.

We had taken on, as one of our firemen, a Canuck, who, from the first, boasted that he was a "bad man"....

He intimidated the cook right off. He punched in a gla.s.s part.i.tion to emphasise a filthy remark he had made to the head engineer. He went after me, to bully and domineer me, next.

It looked as if we were in for a hard voyage to the Georgian Bay.

The Canuck, at the very first meal, terrorised the crew that sat down with him. I looked him over carefully, and realised that something must be done.

He flung a filthy and gratuitous expression my way. Silently I stepped back from the mess room, untied my ap.r.o.n, and meant to go in and try to face him down. But at that juncture, my courage failed me, and instead of inviting the rough-neck out on deck, as I had tried to force myself to do, I hurried to the captain's cabin.

The captain said, "Come in!" to my knock. He was sitting, of all things, in dirty pajamas, at a desk ... though it was mid-day ... his flabby, grey-white belly exuded over his tight pajama waist-string ... the jacket of the pajamas hung open, with all but one b.u.t.ton off.