Tramping on Life Part 98

"Jim, do me a favour, and arrest me ... and I'll sue you, the city of Laurel, and 'Senator' Blair ... all three of you!"

"--guess I won't do it ... but _do_ sit on the bench ... I ask it as a personal favour, Johnnie."

"As a personal favour, Jim, till you are out of sight. Then I'll go back to the gra.s.s."

That night Blair, c.o.c.ksure, had the story of my arrest in the paper.

But, as it happened, he was too previous....

Jerome Miller and Jack Travers joined me in going to the office of the _Globe_, the next morning....

After we had finished telling him what we thought of him, the "Senator"

begged my pardon profusely, and the next day a retraction was printed....

And now school was over at Laurel.

And I determined to b.u.m my way to New York, and, from there, ship on a cattleboat to Europe. Where I would finish writing my play, _Judas_.

Farewell to Laurel!--

I went up to the athletic field and ran my last two miles on its track, at top speed, as good-bye to its cinders forever!

I walked, with a guilty feeling of too much sentimentality, back into the "stack" at the university library. I took down book after book of the great English poets, and pressed my cheek to them in long farewell ... first glancing cautiously around, to be sure that no one was near to observe my actions....

I did not say good-bye to Langworth or my other professor friends, as they had already left for their summer vacations.

I sat in Joe Deacon's room, talking, that last night of my sojourn in Laurel....

"Good old Joe" we called him, because he was possessed of all the old-fashioned virtues, and una.s.sumingly lived up to them. He was a fellow member of the Scoop Club, an a.s.sociate teacher in the School of Journalism, and taught during the summer session....

Long, long Joe and I talked ... of everything young idealists discuss or dream of. We ended with a discussion of the s.e.x question. I reiterated what he already had heard me say, that I had had so far no s.e.x experience. He confessed that he, also, had had none ... maintained that a decent man should wait, if he expected a woman to come pure to him....

I spoke ardently in favour of free love.

He a.s.sented that, theoretically, it was the thing ... but there were a mult.i.tude of practical difficulties that made for favour of the convention of marriage....

"No, if a convention is wrong, it is the duty of everyone who knows the right in his heart, to help smash that convention...."

"You just wait," I boasted imaginatively, "and I'll show you!" "Maybe, Joe," I concluded, for I knew what I said would tease him, "maybe, when I reach the East, I shall break loose." Then I added--and to this day I cannot imagine what put it into my head to say it--what fantastic curl of thought, unless perhaps a premonition of what was soon to come to pa.s.s--

"Penton Baxter has invited me to pay him a visit at Eden, a Single Tax Colony just outside of Philadelphia, before I go on to Europe via cattleboat ... maybe I'll take him up, go down there, and run away with his wife ... she's a mighty pretty woman, Joe!"

Joe was scandalised at my remark--the effect I had wished for.

But after the uproar broke, Joe stoutly maintained that our elopement had all been a frame-up, alleging his conversation with me as proof ...

as who would have not?

Reduced again to my barest equipment, and having left as my forwarding address the office of the _National Magazine_, in New York, I hopped a freight shortly after dawn. It was a fast, through freight. Because of lack of practice I boarded it clumsily, and almost went to my death under its grinding, roaring wheels, there in the Laurel freight-yards. I sat, trembling with the shock to my nerves, on the b.u.mpers.

I hopped off at Argentine, just outside of Kansas City.

I found a camp of tramps and joined with them. We drank coffee together....

But, somehow, the scales had fallen from my eyes. My old idealisation of the life of the tramp, somehow or other, was entirely gone--an idealisation that had, anyhow, been mainly literary, induced by the writings of Jack London, Josiah Flynt and Maxim Gorky.

Now, as I listened to their filthy talk ... their continual "Jesus-Christ'-ing" over everything they said, I grew sick of them. I got up and walked away stiffly--never again to be a tramp.

The reporter of the _Star_, who covered the stockyards, took me to a little st.u.r.dy cattle merchant, who agreed to ship me to New York, in care of five carloads of calves ... for a fee of ten dollars. I persuaded him that I would mail him that ten on arrival at my point of destination ... I have never done so ... when I had it, I needed it more for myself ... and, anyhow, I earned that ten.

My duties with the calves were not many ... merely to walk along the sides of the five cars in my keeping, and see that the calves kept on their legs and did not sprawl over each other ... sometimes one of them would get crushed against the side of the car, and his leg would protrude through the slats. And I would push his leg back, to keep it from being broken ... I made my rounds every time the freight came to a halt.

There were other cars, filled with steers, sheep, and pigs.

Each kind of animal behaved according to its nature, during the trip.

The steers soon accepted their cramped, moving life rather stolidly. The calves acted as if dumbfounded, in stupefied, wide-eyed innocence ...

the sheep huddled as sheep do ... but the big fat porkers were the most intelligent ... like intelligent cowards that fully know their fate, they piled in heaping, screaming, frenzied ma.s.ses ... in scrambling heaps in the centre of their cars ... suffocating, stinking, struggling closer and closer together and leaving great, bare areas unoccupied on either end....

"A pig has no sense in a car ... or anywhere."

"Seems to me they have ... they act as if they know what they're in for, at the other end of the line."

"By golly, that's true! I never thought of it that way before!"

So conversed the head brakeman and I.

My calves soon grew to know me. They bleated, in a friendly manner, as I walked by, overseeing them, when the freight stopped.

We had b.u.mped along as far as Buffalo. There the stock were driven down an incline into yards fenced in with white-washed boards, for their second rest, required by law,--before launching on the last leg of their journey down the middle of New York State, and along the Hudson ...

consigned to Stern and Company of New York....

Some of them were to be butchered there and afford apartment-dwellers lamb stew, tenderloins, and pork chops ... others to be driven aboard cattleboats, for Europe....

At Buffalo I was ripe for a change. Also I wished to pick up threads of former experiences and acquaintanceships ... to have a good gossip about the Eos Art Community ... I called up Laston Meunier who had been at Eos and whom I had first met there ... who loved bohemian ways, and welcomed wandering artistic and literary folk at his home in Buffalo.

"Where are you now?" Laston asked, over the phone.