Tramping With A Poet in the Rockies

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Title: Tramping With A Poet in the Rockies
Author: Lindsay, Vachel, Graham, Stephen
Language: English
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ROCKIES ***

TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES

BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM

THE GENTLE ART OF TRAMPING
THE DIVIDING LINE OF EUROPE
IN QUEST OF EL DORADO
TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES
EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?
THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD
CHILDREN OF THE SLAVES
A PRIVATE IN THE GUARDS
THE QUEST OF THE FACE
RUSSIA IN 1916
PRIEST OF THE IDEAL
THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA
THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD
WITH POOR EMIGRANTS TO AMERICA
WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM
CHANGING RUSSIA
A TRAMP’S SKETCHES
UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA
A VAGABOND IN THE CAUCASUS
ST. VITUS DAY

TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES

BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
AUTHOR OF “EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?”

WITH THIRTY-EIGHT EMBLEMS BY
VERNON HILL

[Illustration]

D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
INCORPORATED
NEW YORK LONDON
1936

_All rights reserved. This book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission of the publisher._

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

Vachel Lindsay is the poet. He is best known as the author of _General
William Booth Enters Heaven_, _The Congo_ and _Johnny Appleseed_. He
also wrote a highly comical piece called _The Daniel Jazz_. He is a
wonderful reciter, and is aided by a sonorous, heaven-reaching voice.
All his poems are written to be read aloud, chanted, or declaimed; in
some cases they are written to be danced also, and played as games.
In many of his recitations the audience is called upon to take part
in choruses and refrains. Thus, in one poem, when Lindsay says, “I’ve
been to Palestine,” the audience as one man has to cry back to him,
“_What did you see in Palestine?_” This is rapturously enjoyed by
the audience. When you have heard the poet you can well understand
that he did not starve when he used to tramp in America and recite to
the farmers for a meal and a night’s lodging. He has gained a great
popularity.

He is, however, something more than an entertainer. He has a spiritual
message to the world, and is deeply in earnest. In a large experience
of men and women in many countries, I have rarely met such a rebel
against vulgarity, materialism, and the modern artificial way of life.
At the same time, despite his poetry, he is almost inarticulate. He has
helped me, and here in a way I help him by giving in a new form part of
the richness of his thoughts and his opinions.

Vachel Lindsay visited England in 1920, and recited his poems at Oxford
and Cambridge and to several groups of friends in London. His mother,
Catharine Frazee Lindsay, who accompanied him, was a notable woman in
Springfield, Illinois, in religious and progressive activities. She
succumbed to an attack of pneumonia this year. But those who met her
in this country recognised in her a remarkable figure. At Vachel’s
invitation I visited Springfield last summer, and we went to the
Rockies, and tramped together to Canada, and this volume is a record
of our holiday. A mutual friend of ours is Christopher Morley, who
brought us together in 1919. When he heard of our projected expedition
he interposed to get some letters for the New York _Evening Post_. Some
thirty-two of these were written, mostly by the camp fire or sitting
on the rocks in the sun, and were printed in the _Post_, where they
attracted considerable attention. “Centurion” in the _Century Magazine_
for August wrote: “Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Graham are having a glorious
time. As for those of us who must spend the dog-days in stuffy cities
and stuffier offices, the picture of the two of them by a camp fire
in the Rockies waking to the freshness and glory of a mountain dawn
is--well, if there are no future issues of the _Century Magazine_,
you may be sure that the entire staff, inspired by this example, has
started vagabonding.” Another, a facetious scribe, wrote: “It is
conceded by every one that Stephen Graham’s _Tramping with a Poet_ will
some day stand on the shelf of open-air literature beside _Travels with
a Donkey_.”

My thanks are due to the representatives of the Great Northern
Railway of America, at St. Paul, who gave us a wonderful collection
of pictures, maps, and books, when they heard we were going, on the
subject of Glacier Park, which we tramped through. In fact, the railway
company would have done a great deal for us, but we eluded their kind
care, as was our wish, and got out entirely on our own.

As Vachel Lindsay was an art student before he was a poet, and wrote
his first verses as scrolls to be illuminated below emblematic figures,
we naturally discussed emblems and emblematic art and hieroglyphics as
we tramped together. The emblems in this book are an attempt to express
that side of our mutual experience. They have been done by my friend,
Vernon Hill, who drew once that very precious work, “The Arcadian
Calendar.”

One of the poems is by “Rusticus,” who, anent our adventures,
contributed it to the New York _Evening Post_.

A last point: Vachel is pronounced to rhyme with Rachel, and is spelt
with one l. It does not rhyme with satchel. The poet asked me to tell
you that.

STEPHEN GRAHAM

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. TRAMPING AGAIN 1

II. FINDING THE POET 7

III. TAKING THE ROAD 14

IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT 21

V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW 28

VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD 34

VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS 40

VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS 47

IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER” 54

X. CLEAR BLUE 62

XI. NATIONAL WILDERNESS 71

XII. GOING WEST 77

XIII. CLIMBING RED EAGLE 82

XIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE 89

XV. PEOPLE IN CAMP 95

XVI. VISITED BY BEARS 101

XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE 108

XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD 114

XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW 121

XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE 127

XXI. DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN 133

XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN” 139

XXIII. THE SUN-WORSHIPPERS 146

XXIV. TWO VOICES 151

XXV. STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS 158

XXVI. LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT 165

XXVII. THE WILLOWS 171

XXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED 177

XXIX. LOG-ROLLING 184

XXX. TOWARD THE KOOTENAI 190

XXXI. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD 196

XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 201

XXXIII. FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN 213

XXXIV. CROSSING THE CANADIAN LINE 221

XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE 231

XXXVI. DUKHOBORS 239

XXXVII. A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 247

XXXVIII. “BLOOM FOR EVER, O REPUBLIC!” 274

TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES

[Illustration: HAIL TO ALL MOVING THINGS]

I. TRAMPING AGAIN

WELL, it’s good to be going tramping again. I’ve been sitting in
European cafés and reading newspapers half a year, from Constantinople
to Berlin, and I’ve only stretched my legs when in strange cities I
needed to find a hotel, beating it pleasurelessly on asphalt. Last
autumn, yes, I was tramping over the ruins and wreck of the war in
France, and the year before that walked across Georgia on the track of
old Sherman. But with a purpose, and in lands where after all there are
hotels, and one pulls the blinds down when the stars appear.

But now I’ve had a real call from Hesperus and the wilds, and am off
with a knapsack and a pot and a blanket, and a free mind--yes, and, I
confess, a few yards of mosquito netting. I’ve left a notice, “Not at
home,” at my Soho flat, though I don’t spend much time there, anyhow;
“Back in half an hour or so,” and there are already four thousand miles
between my arm-chair and me.

And as I hasten to the West the link stretches, stretches. Not that my
flat could ever be lasting home. Where the lady of your heart is, there
is home! And where is she not? The worst thing man ever did to man was
to nail him down. So hail to all things and men which move and keep
moving.

* * * * *

I AM called by one of the most wonderful men who ever broke silence
with a song. He belongs to the same sub-species. Yes, a tramping
species. His hat has got a hole in it, and so have his breeches. But he
is a poet, and he sings of what the world will be when the years have
passed away. He can charm a supper out of a farmer with a song. And I
who have tramped without music know what a miracle that is. They always
said to me, “Chop this wood,” or “Turn that hay,” or “If a man do not
work, then neither shall he eat.”

_Grande erreur_, Mr. Farmer!

“Well, _I_ can’t take to the road,” says Mrs. Farmer. “Look at
me!--it’s wuk, wuk, wuk, all day!” Mrs. Farmer was born on a Saturday.
I always feel sorry for Saturday’s children. They were born a day
before I was. For I was born on a Sunday. How sadly we used to
intone it when we were children--“Saturday’s child works _hard_ for
his living!” And then the relief, “But the child who is born on the
good Sunday, is happy and loving and blithe and gay.” That is the
tramp-baby, born on the day of rest.

* * * * *

I AM sitting at this moment in the St. Louis train heading for
Missouri. The little negro marionette with set smile and the borrowed
voice of a ventriloquist has offered coffee, ice-cream, oranges,
without response, and now the car-conductor has just put into my hand
a tract. It is entitled “Millions Now Living Will Never Die,” and costs
25 cents.

“The emphatic announcement that millions now living on earth will never
die must seem presumptuous to many people; but when the evidence is
carefully considered I believe that almost every fair mind will concede
that the conclusion is a reasonable one.” So the book begins. And you
who are spiritually a citizen of Missouri will doubtless require, like
doubting Thomas of old, to be shown the very truth in substance and
reality.

But the car-conductor has made a mistake. I have not read this book,
but I believe. Though I have not seen, I believe and am blessed.
And though in the Missouri train, I am not going to Missouri. I am
stepping off at Flora, Illinois, to catch the Beardstown local train to
Springfield, which unlike St. Louis and Jerusalem and Capernaum, and
perhaps more like Tyre and Sidon, is a city of faith where they have
bread from heaven to eat.

Not that I am staying in Springfield. But there I pick up the poet.
That is where he haunts--“where Lincoln dreamed in Illinois.” The
poet thinks that the world could be regenerated from a centre in
Illinois--this beautiful state upon which Chicago has thought fit to
rear its awful form.

Some one of Illinois, not the poet, wrote to me, “What do you think
of Springfield as a centre of world thought?” Now I know the craze
of “Boost your home town” can be, and often is, carried to excess,
and little Springfield is not even on a main line from New York. But
neither is Bethlehem nor the human heart. If you want to regenerate
your wicked world you can begin here and now--or, to use the language
of the country, put your hand to your bosom and say it--“_You can begin
right here._” And then, to quote the poet himself, you will have--

Crossed the Appalachians,
And turned to blazing warrior souls
Of the lazy forest.

Springfield will not hold us. But we shall take Springfield with us. We
are going to take it in our hearts and place it on the top of the Rocky
Mountains, at the Triple Divide, where the waters of the new world
flow north and east and west--

[Illustration]

_Going tramping again,
Going to the mountains,
To recapture the stars,
To meet again the nymphs of the fountains.
To visit the bear,
To salute the eagles,
To be kissed all night by wild-flowers in the grass!_

[Illustration: TO HEART’S DESIRE]

II. FINDING THE POET

FLORA, Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street,
and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks
rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that
voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour
is called _Main Street_ and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people
and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or
jocularly discussed at every tea-table. It sheds a bright light on
the life of a typical little town in the Middle West. It names the
town Gopher Prairie--because the Middle West is prairie land and the
gopher-rats or marmots live there in myriads in their little burrows.
The novelist seems to suggest that the people themselves are a species
of gopher, a little people, limited of view, good-natured, of the earth
earthy, but always bobbing-up. Because of the criticism implied in this
novel the Middle West would rather now be called the “Central West.”

These Main Streets, however, except for the sophisticated eyes of a
college girl inauspiciously married, are probably not so bad as the
realist paints them. They are dull, but genuine. They exhibit our
modern civilisation without too many shams. See the people working
in the heat. The minds of the young are set on their dull jobs and
not thinking of drink or sex--it is sufficiently wonderful. There
are “Main Street” towns in every country in Europe, and life is dull
in them though adorned by fights and drinks and “hussies”--but where
will you find such an unexhausted _élan_ and zest for the unornamented
reality that America affords? Where else moreover will you find the
working-men to-day working in silk shirts? Life in Main Street seems
worth while, at least to those who live there.

It’s a by-line from Flora to Springfield, and you plough iron slowly
through Illinois corn. An old mechanical car-conductor with grey straw
hat and fat stubby face calls the stations one by one in an outlandish
accent which to a stranger is entirely baffling. He collects the
tickets, and if you are for Springfield he puts a red check in your
hat-band; if you are for anywhere else it is a white check. Springfield
is now in the mind’s eye as a large place and is printed everywhere in
big type. The Springfield _Register_ and the Springfield _Journal_ make
showing.

* * * * *

I READ the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on
the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await
the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England
would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and
space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late
dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the
poet’s face under a small black felt--“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,”
and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring
the mountain to Mahomet. In the literary world when invitations are
rife there is a golden rule--_Promise everything and do just what you
like._ So one never really knows whether “Yes, I’ll come,” means yea,
yea or nay, nay.

It meant yea, yea this time, and so, getting out of the Beardstown
local which pulled up outside the station, behold--two strong men
stand face to face and they come from the ends of the earth. Vachel
Lindsay rasped out sentences of welcome in broad Illinois and I replied
in whispering English, and we bundled along Fifth Street for home.
Then mother, of seventy years, tiptoed and curtsied and smiled with
the roguishness of a young maid, and brought us in. So we sit now on
rocking-chairs and talk while beads of moisture roll ticklingly adown
our brows, and it is home.

Vachel is a poetical vagabond. I also am a vagabond. There lies our
common ground. He is an old-fashioned hiker of the tramping parson
type. He leaves home, as it were to post a letter, and does a thousand
or so miles. He made a rule once to travel without money, and he
recited his poems to the farmers and their wives for food and a night’s
lodging. Like Weston, who tramped with ice-blocks under his hat and
water streaming down his neck, he can do his twenty miles a day over a
long time and has travelled some huge distances in his day. I for my
part hardly believe in tramping for tramping’s sake, but in living with
Nature for what that is worth.

To sleep under the stars, to live with the river that sings as it
flows, to sit by the embers of morning or evening fire and just dream
away time and earnestness, to gather sticks to keep the old pot
a-boiling, to laze into the company of strangers and slip out of their
company in time, to make friends with bird and beast, and watch insects
and grubs--to relax and to be; that’s my idea of tramping. The blessed
nights full of dew or rain and breeze, the full length of a ferny bed
that Mother Earth provides--don’t they attract, don’t they pull one
away from the town! And then the day, with celestial, unadvertised,
unpaid-for sunshine or shade, on the rocks, on the tufty hills, beside
tiny springs or stream on the stairs of the mountains!

* * * * *

I HAD an idea I was finding my poet at Springfield--well, I know
I shall not find him now till we get to the wilderness. He is yet
incarcerated in the home town. He reflects in his soul the grey walls
and squat architecture of the city; his nerves are still tied to the
leading strings of audiences and friends; his soul, like a rare singing
bird lately caught by the curious, flings itself against the bars and
pines for the wilderness. All is going to go well with him and us, I
surmise, and his eyes will have mountains and stars in them, and his
nerves get free of strings and sink into their natural beds for a rest,
and his soul, that rarely plumaged, wingéd wanderer ’twixt heaven and
earth--well, some one has come to open the cage door and let him fly
away, to heart’s desire.

The world will have to send a fowler after him with a net, if it wants
to get him back. And to find him--it will be “a long ways.”

[Illustration]

_The poet was in Fifth Street
Mewed up as in a prison.
He was moping in his bedchamber
All the day long
Far from the mountains and the flowers,
But see, a visitor has arrived
From strange parts._

[Illustration]

III. TAKING THE ROAD

WE packed our knapsacks at Springfield, and stowed away blankets and
socks, a coffee-pot, and a frying-pan. We bought at a ten-cent store
knife and fork and spoon, skillet, towels which we sewed into sacks,
mugs, and what was labelled “The Mystic Mit--the greatest discovery
since soap for cleaning pots and pans.” Lindsay had hobnails put
in his old boots and bought a handsome pair of corduroy breeches,
which, together with his old black hat, made him look like a tramping
violinist. Springfield bade us farewell. We were one night in the
train to Chicago and travelled all day north to St. Paul. We were then
two nights and a day crossing the great land ocean of Minnesota, North
Dakota, and eastern Montana--what was once an unending stage-coach
trail to the West.

“This is what I like,” said Lindsay--“the prairie to the horizon,
no fences, no stone walls, as in New England. It is all broad and
unlimited; that is why since the days of Andrew Jackson all the great
politicians have come from the West--the unfenced West. I’d like to put
all the Boston and New York people out here on the plains and let the
plain men run the East.”

To me, however, it looked a land of endless toil as I saw it from train
windows, and I thought of the toiling pioneers and the Russians in
the Dakotas, the Swedes and the Germans content to live and toil and
be swallowed up at last by the distances and the primitive. European
life-rivers have flowed into these deserts and made them what they are.
One day their children perhaps will have a Western consciousness, an
American consciousness.

* * * * *

WE stepped off the train at Glacier Park Station. Some dozen women in
khaki riding breeches were waiting on the platform, and six or seven
people got out from the tourist and Pullman cars to cross to the great
log-built hotel opposite. Then the train started again and toiled
onwards to the heights of the divide, whence, as Kipling put it:

They ride the iron stallions down to drink;
To the canyons and the waters of the West.

We spent a night at the hotel and were much amused by the idea of a
room with a bath in such a place, and by the notice that you could have
your linen laundered in twenty-four hours. There was dancing in the
evening in an immense hall lit by red Chinese lanterns and adorned by
bear-skins and Alaskan ornaments--a fair company of people, too, though
mostly from the West.

We, however, were eager for the road, and set out next morning with
blankets and provisions and steered a north-westerly or west by
north-westerly course by our compasses, abjuring trails and guides. Our
idea was to obtain a cross-section view of the Rockies in their most
primitive state unguided by convention. We hoped to realise something
of what America was like for at least a hundred years after Columbus
discovered it. We were headed for the virgin land.

How quickly did we leave that hotel with its “stopping over” crowd
behind! In an hour we were in the deep silence of the mountains
encompassed on each side by exuberant pink larkspurs and blanket
flowers and red paint-brush. We clambered upward, ever upward, through
fresh, young, chattering aspens and then green tangled pinewood--and
then also through old dead forests lying in black confusion, uprooted,
snapped, stricken, in heaps like the woods of the Somme Valley. Then
we walked through new dead forests, burned only last year, and then
through brown scorched forests that did not burn, but died merely of
the great heat which their neighbours’ burning had caused.

We stepped from log to log and tree to tree, making for the open
and the light, with the gaiety of troubadours, and Lindsay seemed
romantically happy. I also was happy, and thought of the happy days
before the war, when I tramped in this fashion back and forth across
the Caucasus Mountains and along hundreds of miles of Black Sea shore.
It was pure joy to light the first fire and fry our bacon and make our
coffee in the full effulgence of the sun.

* * * * *

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, which we passed through first, is a preserve.
It is God’s holy mountain on which no man may shoot. By the laws you
are not allowed even to frighten a bird. You may not carry firearms
into the region. We were therefore not very agreeably surprised to hear
in the thickets the whiz-ping of a gun which some Indians were using.
Lindsay nearly got a shot in the head as he got up from luncheon. The
fact is, Glacier adjoins the Blackfeet Indian reservation, and the
Indians are all hunters by instinct and preference. It is difficult
to restrain them. They are a gay, independent, and wild lot. We saw a
number of these men with an array of plumes round their heads, steel
padlocks in their ears for ear-rings, cow-bells on their sleeves,
and chequer-work embroidery on their gay vests and cloaks. They had
with them their squaws, fat and handsome women, all swollen out and
weather-beaten like fishwives, with high cheek-bones and red-ochre
faces. They danced together and skirled in wild Asiatic strains while
four intent ruffians in ordinary attire beat upon one small drum with
sticks. I seemed to recognise in them some sort of acquaintance to my
old friends, the nomads of Central Asia, the Kirghiz--the same sort of
faces and the same way of being musical. I have had a similar musical
entertainment during weeks and months tramping in Turkestan and Seven
Rivers Land. Both Kirghiz and Indians are dying out and both are red. I
was struck by the feminine expression of the faces of the Indians and
the absence of hair on their lips and chins--as if their males were not
male.

However, we soon left the Blackfeet behind, and came out of their
forests, and in late afternoon stood high above the lovely length of
water which we identified as Medicine Lake.

[Illustration]

_The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise,
Our hearts are dancing too.
We love the Indians because they never bent their backs
To slavery,
To civilisation,
To office-desks.
What matter if they are dying out,
They have at least lived once._

[Illustration:

I WENT TO A HOUSE
AND I KNOCKED AT THE DOOR
BUT THE OLD LADY SAID
I HAVE SEEN YOU BEFORE]

IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT

WE spent our first night in a burned forest beside a sunken pink and
grey rock. There was a green carpet of unblossoming flowers as green
and romantic as ideal spring, and beside it in contrast the stark
blackness of the charred trees all up and down the hill. Hidden from
view but twenty yards away was a foaming rivulet with pools.

We bathed and we cooked and we talked and we slept. A great mountain
like God Almighty in the midst of His creation was visible to us
through the trees. We made our beds soft by pulling the dead red
foliage from scorched trees and heaping it under our blankets beside
the pink rocks. Lindsay made hot a large stone in the embers of our
fire to keep him warm. So we lay down and waited for the night. I
looked through black masts and great entanglements to the hills.
Lindsay faced a scorched section of the forest all hanging in brown
tresses. We listened to the stream below, its music becoming every
moment more insistent. We knew that it would lull us all night long.

The mountain cloud then began to come down and roll over the tree-tops,
giving them ghostly semblance. That passed, and the stars and the moon
appeared and stillness ruled. An hour before dawn we were awakened by
the sudden patter of a shower of rain and it was followed by the birth
of a wind which came roaring along a ravine and started all the air
moving everywhere and all the dead forest creaked and whined. It was
our signal to arise.

* * * * *

LINDSAY rose like a young lion roaring, rrrah!... and making the
mountains echo with his roar. “Let us go up higher,” says he. I read
him this. “Put it, ‘Lindsay arose groaning and grunting like a pig
under a gate--and let people choose,’” said the poet.

He was in great spirits. “I have never been so free. I start afresh.
All is behind me. We’ll tramp to the coast. We’ll tramp to Alaska.
We’ll do all the national parks, the same way,” were his impulsive
speeches.

As we climbed aloft, following the North-west by our wrist-compasses,
and careless of time and space, he sang a disreputable song belonging
no doubt to that disreputable past of his when he hiked and begged and
recited his poems to farmers--

Why don’t you go to work
Like other men do?
How can we work when there’s no work to do?
Hallelujah, on the bum!
Hallelujah, bum again!
Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out
To revive us again!

“You do look a real honest-to-God tramp this morning,” said I in the
language of the country, “with your corduroys burst out at the knees,
old red handkerchief round your neck, and devil-may-care look in your
eyes.”

We reached the top of a mountain where there was a perfect “cyclorama,”
as he called it, and he balanced on his toes, and half closed his eyes
in his half upturned face, and turned round and about like a teetotum.
Last time I had seen him do this was on the carpet of a London
drawing-room in Queen Anne’s Gate to the strains of “_Let Samson be
a-coming in to your mind_.”

This mountain was our first _ne plus ultra_, for having got to the top
of it there was only one thing to do, and that was to go down again.
Lindsay tested the echoes from it with “_Rah for Bryan!_” apparently
his favourite war-cry, and then as if in response a slim Indian youth
on horseback appeared and seemed much amused by us. He was very red
and swarthy, with bright teeth, and rode his horse as if he and it
made one. He told us he knew all the mountains and had been to the top
of every one except Rising Wolf, which had never been climbed by any
one. “It is called ‘Wolf gets up’ in our language,” he explained, and
pointed to its snarling and menacing mass upstarting through clouds. “A
storm comes from the mountain,” said he in warning, and passed on. He
passed and we remained, and we saw no other human being the whole day.

“Just think of the children these flowers would amuse,” said Lindsay.
“Millions of flowers--and the only human being we see is an Indian. I’d
like to write a song on it.”

* * * * *

BUT the poetic mood passed. Thunderclouds rose in spectral peaks behind
the mountains. Mount Helen grew dark and dreadful, and four phantasmal
Mount Helens appeared behind her, the first of white mist, the second
of lead, the third of streaming cloud, the fourth of shadow. Rising
Wolf entered heaven; a howling, gathering, tumultuous wind roared over
all the pines of the valleys and lightning like the glint of an eye
traversed the ravine. Clouds swept forward to embrace us and indeed
overtook us and soaked us while we sat together on a downward slide and
sheltered under a blanket.

The storm passed, but we got drenched to our necks as we walked through
dense undergrowth downward to a strikingly prominent clump of gigantic
pines which from aloft we had chosen as harbourage for the night. These
lifted their fine forms from immemorial heaps of old pine mould, soft
and brown and porous. There was a stream near them and we lit a great
fire by the water’s edge and hung out a line to dry blankets, coats,
pants, socks, and all we possessed.

The heat flew up in armfuls of smoke, in showers of sparks, up to our
sagging shirts and heavy blankets. Sparks in hundreds lighted on them,
and went out or burned small holes. We walked about like savages the
while, wresting dead wood to build ever higher the fire. I pulled down
a branch with a tree-wasp’s nest upon it, and brought a cloud of wasps
after our bodies, and I paid the penalty in a sting. Thus, however, we
dried everything, and we were able at last to make a dry bed in a wet
place. But rain came on again at night, and in the intense darkness
under the giant pines we lay and heard it, and slept, and then waked to
hear it again.

[Illustration]

_If it rains in the town and if you get caught in the rain
And soaked to the bone--ah what a calamity!
You must have a hot bath, and take some hot toddy;
You must swallow an aspirin and sleep under blankets,
Whilst your clothes on two chairs by the fire will be drying;
You must put on dry clothes in the morning.
It’s different in the mountains,
You can sleep wet and wake wet,
And dry when the weather gets drier,
That’s more fun: try it._

[Illustration: SERAPHICAL SUNRISE]

V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW

IT cleared up before dawn, but it rained for three hours after dawn.
Vachel got up in the night and relit the fire and made himself a hot
rock. Coming back into our dark and gloomy thicket, he mistook my form
for a bear, and his heart jumped. We lived in expectation of meeting
bears. “There’ll just be one heading in the _Illinois Register_,” says
Vachel--“ATE BY BEARS.” We placed our bacon twenty yards away from
where we slept, and hoped tacitly that they would take the bacon and
spare us.

Our knapsacks weighed double next morning because of the wet in our
things. We got wetter still as we ploughed out through flower fields
of a drowned paradise. But an hour before noon the sun broke free and
started a miraculous drying of Nature and of ourselves. We seemed to
cook in the steam of our own clothes. On the hillside, at last, we
decided to rest and we spread out everything to dry, dispensing with
most of our clothes, and we lay in the sun in the hot damp of the
flowers and let Old Sol stream into us.

Early in the afternoon most of our clothes were dry and, following
the compass, we climbed up and up to a great height through primeval
forest. The trees were so close that often we could not squeeze
between them with our packs. We hustled and bustled and impolitely
pushed through branches and umbrage and crossed tiny glades filled
with ineffably lovely basket grass, holding aloft their cream crowns
of blossom. It seemed to us a great struggle, and Lindsay and I held
different opinions as to what we should find when we got to the end
of the wood, and both of us were wrong. He thought it would be “the
divide.” I thought it might be another _ne plus ultra_ and a sheer
descent.

But instead it was a sort of end of the world. Our primeval forest came
sharply to an end on a deep, green, wind-bitten line where the branches
of the trees were gnarled and twisted and beaten downward. Beyond that
was a boulder-strewn upper-mountain region and a wall of rock. We asked
no questions as to the morrow, but camped beside a huge stone. It was
twelve feet high, but one could creep under it and be safe from the
rain. And a few feet away was our first snow-bank. We built a big fire
and made tea of melted snow, and Lindsay made ice-cream of sugar and
condensed milk and snow which we voted very good, and we made eight or
nine hot rocks for our bed.

* * * * *

BECAUSE of the mountain-wall above us sunset took place at about four
in the afternoon here. But a beautiful evening endured long in the east
below us. We were so exalted that we looked a hundred miles over the
plains and saw, as it were, the whole world picked out in shadow and
sunshine below. Sunset slowly advanced over it all, and with reflected
rays from an unseen west the day passed serenely away.

Lindsay, being the colder man, slept under the great boulder, and I
smoothed out a recess at the side. I lay beside scores of daintily
hooded yellow columbines and looked out to the occasional licked-sweet
redness of an Indian paint brush. A chipmunk rudely squeaked at us,
and as a last visitor a humming bird boomed over our heads like a
night-awakened beetle.

We slept serenely. At two I awoke to see a fleeting half moon, all
silver, tripping homeward over the high wall of the mountain with
attendant stars behind. But away in the east there was a faint rose
light over a bank of darkness. The darkness slowly took sharp contour,
and the light that comes before the light of day picked out ten or
twelve lakes and tarns which we had not noticed until then. The
darkness below the rose quivered with lightning; the zenith clearness
grew clearer and clearer, and then, with uplifting hands of glory and
light, came seraphical sunrise.

Our bonfire, which had burned red all night, now burned a pallid yellow
in the new light, and we brought out our blankets into the open and lay
down and slept again in the increasing light and warmth of the new day.
Then breakfast at seven and God’s in his heaven. And we washed in the
snow, and scores of curlews screamed from rock to rock above us on the
road that we should take.

“How new it all is!” said the poet. “It is as if no one ever slept here
before and wakened to see what we see or to do the things we do.”

Wrapped in our thoughts we put our packs on our shoulders and
meditatively turned our steps to the downward-dropping corner of the
mountain-wall which obscured the adventures of the new day.

[Illustration]

We cut off the top of the snow with a sharp piece of slate,
And took the purer under-snow to make our coffee,
To make ice-cream:
_Fastidious creatures!_
And then we stood in the snow-hole
And washed with warm water,
And rubbed ourselves all over with handfuls of sloppy snow--
_Disgusting old tramps!_
The discreet birds watched us,
The chipmunks squeaked at us,
You didn’t see us.

[Illustration: THE DOWNWARD WAY]

VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD

FOR several days now we did not meet a human being or see evidence of
the existence of one; nor, though continually imagining that we had
found a bit of a trail, did we find either a footstep or a hoof-mark.
“I’ve never been before in a place where you did not see tin cans,”
said Lindsay. “Why, some of the popular canyons of the West are
literally filled with cans. It is not only tourist parties that leave
them, but the cowboys live on canned goods and fill the valley with
their cans.” Another relief is the absence of advertisements, of all
the signs of modern civilisation. You are given without reserve to
America as she was.

“I don’t believe in class war,” says Lindsay, as we turn the corner of
the mountain-wall. “I believe in the war of the mountain and the desert
with the town. Only the deserts and mountains of America can break the
business-hardened skulls of the East.”

He wants me to seek with him the source of the American spirit in the
mountains of the West. However, reality confronts us and not a dream.
We see beyond the wall of the mountain, terrace after terrace and
cascade upon cascade, gleaming upward on a sort of endless stairway. To
the first waterfall we count eight bays of loose stone and shale. We
step from rock to rock, and as my legs are longer this hinders Lindsay
more than it does me. He is all for diagonalising downward, or even
going straight down, and finding an imaginary easier course skirting
the edge of the forest. We, however, try to keep our level, but whether
we wish it or no we slide downward at each uncertain step.

At last we come to a bay of tiny, trickling silt, so steep and smooth
that a glass marble might roll from the top of the mountain to the
bottom. Decent progress along this is impossible, so we decide to
toboggan to the bottom, and seat ourselves on broad, flat stones,
and guiding ourselves with our hands go off at a rare pace for that
imaginary better way at the skirting of the mid-mountain forest. The
device reminds Lindsay of an Indian Government agent who had the task
of supplying the Indians with all they needed on their reservation.

There came, consigned to him, some very large skillets or frying-pans,
which the Indians repeatedly refused to take away, having no use for
them. At last one day the chief came in and gladly took away the lot.
The agent, curious to know what they were going to do with them, went
out to see. He found half the tribe on the hillside and a very gay game
in progress--Indians sitting in the frying-pans and tobogganing on the
loose shale.

We slid to the bottom like the Indians, but we found no better way
down there. The skirting of the mid-mountain forest ran unevenly, now
up three hundred feet, now down again, and it was too arduous a way
for us. “Let us go down through the forest and seek a trail,” said my
companion. Once more we entered the primeval crowd of vegetation, and
like police hurrying to some scene of accident, pushed our way through.
In half an hour we made good progress downward and came to a sheer
cliff over the rivulet of the valley. The cliff was feathered with
pines, and we let ourselves down with our hands from the tops of trees,
from branches, from stem to stem and trunk to trunk, to the verdant
pit of the stream. We clambered downward like two curious Mowglis, but
with large humps on our backs, and the humps were our packs. And how
these packs of ours pulled us about! We seldom touched earth with our
feet and therefore constantly slewed around and dangled with our packs
entangled in thick growth.

There was little to console the poet when the water was reached, unless
it was the mess of tea we made on a fire on a dank, red rock standing
out of the stream. But he was all for fording the water and for trying
to find a better way on the other side. This we did, and we climbed up
again and then we climbed down. And we found no better way. For no one
had been there before us to make it for us.

But we found beautiful quarters at last among the snows and the
waterfalls below the pass, and we slept under innumerable stars, lulled
by the choruses of many waters. We made breakfast at dawn and talked
till it was warm. Vachel told me of his past--how he had struggled
always against the downward way. People had said to him, “You must
make money. You must enter a profession.” When as an art student he
had gained some power with the pencil, they had said, “You must enter
commercial art”; when as poet he had been recognised, they had said,
“You must let us organise and commercialise your gift, turn it into
money for you.” “They wanted to Barnumise me,” said my companion, “and
take me all over America as a reciting freak. When I refused, they
said, ‘You’ll end in the poor-house,’ and I replied, ‘I don’t care:
show me the poor-house--let me go to it.’” He had taken to the road
to regain his self-respect. He had gone without any money, and in the
hospitality and kindness of the farmers he had won a personal faith in
the common man and a reliance which was not merely on success. When he
harvested in Kansas for two dollars fifty a day, that daily wage was
like millions to him. And now with me, when all the world was telling
him he must do thus and so, he was finding in the wilderness of the
Rockies a new means of escape.

“To-morrow,” said he, “we will climb right away to the top and find the
pass into new country.”

[Illustration]

_Who said it was easier to go down,
Facilis decensus and the rest?
I’ll say it is more painful
Than to go up.
You think it was great fun a-sliding down the shale
On large flat rocks.
But it leaves me cold,
As the saying is,
For the seat of my pants is much thinner._

[Illustration: THEY OUTSTAYED US AND WILL OUTSTAY US]

VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS

MY companion’s secret thought is that he is a Virginian. But how, since
he was born in Illinois and his parents in Kentucky? “I am a follower
of Poe and Jefferson,” he answers. Kentucky was largely colonised from
Virginia, and the poet is ready to claim allegiance to the chivalric,
leisurely and flamboyant genius of the South. “If only as a protest
against the drab, square-toed, dull, unimaginative America which is
gaining on us all,” he adds. He has a passion for ideal democracy,
and his great hero of the hour as we stride over the rocks is John
Randolph, of Roanoke, who could enter Congress with four hounds and
a dog-whip and make speeches to which all must listen. “America,”
Lindsay insists, “simply _needs_ the flamboyant to save her soul.” I
suppose, because of that faith, he also, Vachel Lindsay, the poet, is a
flamboyant genius.

The higher we rose in the mountains the more serious became our
conversation. We were silent only when we lost our breath. Upon
occasion, in this grand and lonely scene, the poet would lift his voice
so high that it could have been heard on the mountain on the other side
of the valley. His enthusiasm naturally lifted his resonant voice. His
political hero is John Randolph or Andrew Jackson, his literary hero
is Ruskin, his artist in marble is Saint-Gaudens, his pet hobby is
Egyptian hieroglyphics, his passion is the road, and his ideal is St.
Francis. Tell it to the mountains and the streams; tell it out! They
hear and so do I.

* * * * *

WHERE we stand is where never man has stood before, or foot of man has
trod, and the fresh and virginal flowers on every hand look up at us
with mute surprise. We carry our argument higher and higher. We sit
and boil our pot beside a bank of purple heather, exalted upon the bare
scarp of a sun-drowned mountain, and crackling of roots in the fire
blends with strident Middle-West American. We pull up to the black door
of a great rock, and the splashing of a cascade splashes through his
vibrant tones.

At last, however, the mountains silenced us. They outstayed us, and
will outstay us. They ate up our provisions, and swallowed our breath,
and beguiled us deceptively to climb higher. “Upward and onward!” was
invisibly written on every crag. And we always expected to get to
the top in an hour. We finished the coffee, we finished the milk, we
finished the bread, we finished the sugar. We got down to a rasher of
bacon a day and tea without sugar and milk. Then even the much-loathed
bacon got finished, and the problem was to find a “camp” and get more
supplies. So we set ourselves seriously to the task of finding a pass
over the range.

The poet became much exhausted, and the high altitude evidently
affected him more than it did me. We walked quarter-hours and rested
quarter-hours, and every time we rested we fell fast asleep. I led up
the steep inclines, and we stopped every twenty paces and listened to
our breath, I to his breath, he to mine--_ao, ao, ao_--almost a sob,
and waited for the _ahoo_ sound, which meant that the lungs had filled
again. After some arduous hours in this wise, we came on our first
destitute afternoon, to our first topmost ridge. A cold hurricane
seemed to try to stop our final conquest of it, and it went through our
bodies like swords. But when we exultantly bore through it we came to a
sheer precipice going down to a narrow corridor which led always to the
northward.

* * * * *

VACHEL punctuates most of his remarks with a wild native yell--“Whoopee
Whuh!” but he was down to a whisper now, and could no longer move the
mountains with a “Hurrah for Bryan.” Silently and rather mournfully we
diagonalised downward to a far blue lake which was the ultimate end
of the valley, and the source of the stream we had followed for days.
Devastating winds blew across us, and we watched how they descended
upon the surface of that lake and tore it off in sprays and circles of
water and steam. We found what seemed to be a horse trail over the
shingle, but it led to an extensive field of snow, and we recognised
only the footsteps of a bear. The lake was not blue, but green when we
got near to it, and was banked on three sides by snow.

Said Vachel: “Here, Stephen, is the place to catch a fish.”

I said: “No, Vachel, this is just a snow-melt; there never were any
fish here.”

“Nevertheless try!” said the poet.

Now we had purchased fishing tackle, though we had no rods. And Vachel
had a large red wooden grasshopper, and I had a large green one.

Vachel said: “You must throw your grasshopper in, and I’ll go light a
fire so as to be ready to cook the fish.”

So I fastened my fat green wooden gentleman to the gut, and the gut to
the line, and attaching a stone, flung him in the air. Behold, he flew
like a grasshopper and disported with the winds. But when he settled at
last on the surface of that green and snowy lake, he always made a most
rapid progress toward the shore. I sailed him like a boat. No fish
came, and even our faith remained unrewarded.

Was not this adventure prophetically put in verses in _Alice_, where
some one sent a message to the fish, telling them, this is what I
wish. And the little fishes’ answer was--“We cannot do it, sir,
because,”--the little fishes, as was disclosed later, were in bed.

We sat down together in a place like the heath in Macbeth, and the
weird sisters were ready to appear, had we been evil. The sun had
set, winds were blowing from four directions at the same time, and
it was bitterly cold. A tiny fire of roots peeped at us and smoked
and chattered, and we tried hard to get warm at it. We looked at the
mountain-walls, we looked at our maps and compasses. We thought of the
night and of our empty wallets and insides. “Just think of Broadway at
this minute,” said Vachel. “Still sweltering in heat, not yet lighted
up for evening pleasure.” We felt far from civilisation, and sighed
at last for what we despised. “Or think of Piccadilly and Shaftesbury
Avenue,” said I, “all a-swarm with the light-hearted summer crowd of
London.”

“Well, we can’t sleep here,” said I at length.

“Let us make one last attempt to get over to the other side.”

Vachel seemed surprised, but agreed with alacrity: “I’m for it,” said
he.

[Illustration]

_The greedy old mountains have been to our knapsacks
And eaten up most of our food.
They’ve swallowed our breath and silenced our speech.
But they haven’t broken our hearts.
It takes more than a mountain to do that!_

[Illustration: IMPRISONED IN THE VIEWLESS WINDS]

VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS

MY companion has a curious old-man-of-the-woods appearance. It is not
his loose red handkerchief round his neck so much as his hanging,
dead-branch-like arms. His face sleeps even when he is awake. He walks
when he is tired in a patient, dog-like way, treading in my very steps.
No ribald songs, now, of tramping days--but as if hushed by the hills
he croons ever to himself--

O Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
Lo, on thy topmost mount I stand,

and in a sort of hymnal marching step, like way-worn pilgrims, we take
the trackless way upward once again. And it is late twilight. Sombre
hope and patience dwell in our hearts as we trudge, trudge upward.

By slow stages we reach a new possible pass, and every time we stop and
turn round and sit down to rest we face the lake. On three sides the
descent to the water is precipitous, and an overhanging snow-crust goes
round. In the late light the surface of the lake is a still, viscous
green and the mountain above it a calm blood-red. The snow patches
on the mountain are of fantastic shape and give an idea of futurist
designs. We stare at the patches and see in one of them a ferocious
white tiger, stalking forward with a demented white cat on its back.
In another we see an Egyptian figure, slender, with veiled features of
awful and eternal significance. These grow in the dusk. The winds chase
over us, and when they pass there are moments of windlessness, and we
watch hurrying grey rags of clouds running over the brow of the ridge
above us and losing themselves in thin air.

It is a romantic climb. We support each other up the steep, sitting
down every twenty paces in breathlessness. Vachel sits with his head on
my shoulder and I with my head on his. In a minute or so we recover and
sit up straight, in the half darkness, and pick up flat stones and try
to make them skid over the snow patches. For a moment I was taken back
to the romantic vein of “Parsifal” as I saw it in Vienna, last May, and
we were Wagnerian pilgrims, toiling upwards in the ecstacy of mystical
opera. Somewhere below us, in the lake, all the violins should sob and
croon together and aspire, yes, aspire and throb, and the drums should
start the gods to look at us. But we treated the matter in light vein.
“The Bacon-eaters,” said Vachel _sotto voce_. “Seventh reel.”

* * * * *

A MIGHTY final effort brought us to the top. I shall not soon forget
the dramatic sensation of seeing the new sky which suddenly began to
lift itself into our view from out the other side of the mountain,
a sky with more light, for it lay in the West. It was as if the
prison-wall of the mountain had been thrown down and that which
prisoners dream about and rave about had been given us.

And there was a way down. It was night and nothing, but we found a
narrow gully on the other side, five or six feet broad, two or three
thousand feet down, and an appalling steepness. This gully was all
loose stones and boulders which the slightest touch sent clattering or
thundering to the bottom. We were nerved to the descent by what we had
gone through and by our joy at finding a way out.

I took the lead, clutched the rock wall for support, and began to
slip downward, tentatively and cautiously. But directly I started,
a wonderful thing occurred. I found the whole body of loose stones
under my feet moved with me, and I began a progress as on a moving
staircase, down, down, down, as in Jules Verne’s _Journey to the Centre
of the Earth_--easily, steadily. Pleasure in this was, however, rudely
disturbed. Lindsay had started downward behind me and was naturally
starting a movement of rocks on his own, and suddenly a leg-breaking
boulder flew past on my track with dumfounding acceleration. I climbed,
therefore, away from the moving staircase into a cleft of the rock and
waited for the poet to draw level.

* * * * *

IT was dark night now, and as the rocks from Lindsay’s feet rushed
past they struck bright sparks in the gloom. How they crashed! How
they thundered and lurched and thumped, and thumped again, and thudded
into the abyss below, and how the little stones rattled after them! We
agreed to go downward in short spells, one at a time, and then go into
shelter and wait till we drew level again. And as we sat side by side
in the gloom we looked to the great mountains on the other side of the
new valley and discerned a colossal figure nine in snow, staring at us
out of the darkness. It was eerie. It needed a deal of nerve to go on.

And we did not go much further. At one point I thought I saw two human
beings, or they might have been bears, struggling slowly upward toward
us. I shouted to them and they stopped. But they made no reply and
just glowered menacingly upward. That was the end for me. I would
go no further. I gave the halloo to Lindsay and got into shelter.
He came down the way I had come, laboriously, cautiously, like some
weather-beaten old soldier, a skulker from beyond human ken. And he
also desired to do no more that night. So we lay in a lair of a beast
on the brink of a sheer cliff, far, as it happened, above mist and
cloud and a rain that was falling below, and slumbered the night away.

[Illustration]

_The Guardsman and the Western Bard_[1]
_Went hiking hand in hand.
They felt uplifted much to see
The prospects wide and grand.
“A thousand leagues,” said one, “Oh Steve,
From any boardwalk band.”_

_“How fine the air, immense the view!
The trees are large and green.
See! Here are glades and crystal rills,
And every scent and petal fills_

_Our souls with pure ecstatic thrills.
Afflatus holds the scene!”
The Guardsman pointed to the sun.
“It’s supper time, I mean.”_

_And as they munched the cracker thin
And quaffed eau naturel,
The gates of heaven were oped--and all
Its liquid contents fell.
They felt the truth that bards have sung:
Heaven is a limpid well._

_Then night came on, that covers all
Of high and mean degree,
The king, the clown, the russet gown,
The land, the clouds, the sea.
“And yet I scarcely feel,” said one,
“It really covers me.”_

_Long time they sought sweet slumber’s balm,
Kind antidote to care.
“O soft embalmer,” was their psalm
That filled the mountain air.
Embalmer! Something rough in pine
Was as all they wanted there._

_A chilly dawn illumed the East,
Most wonderfully wet.
And evermore their pangs increased,
Nor heaven’s libations ever ceased ...
(No further messages released
They’re on that mountain yet)._

[1] Contributed by “Rusticus” to the _New York Evening Post_ at this
point in our adventures.

[Illustration: WHEN HE IS IN PAIN HE CALLETH FOR THE BOTTLE]

IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER”

“I SUFFERED forty-seven separate chills,” said the poet. “And
forty-seven separate cramps,” said I. Did we sleep? Six hours passed
somehow and it seemed not so long as waiting that time for a train or
for a theatre to open. Lindsay lay in a sort of hole. I lay with my
head half over the abyss. I watched the stars swim out of the clouds
above. I saw the blackness of the bottomless below us become grey as
the clouds formed there. Lindsay cried out once: “I’m getting up to
light a fire.” “Impossible!” I rejoined. “There’s no wood, and no
place to light it.”

“I am afraid the clouds are below us; we may have to stay up here all
day,” I whispered, an hour before dawn. But it was all the same to the
poet, whose thoughts were entirely in the present.

Destiny, however, was kind to us. The clouds at last lifted and
drifted, and angels at sunrise lifted white curtains and smiled at us.

A couple of old woe-begone weather-beaten tramps lifted themselves
up cautiously and peeped at the wilderness. Last night’s nerve had
gone. With backs bent, and sometimes on hands and knees, they picked
their way gingerly down to the far snow dump beneath, to the first
wind-missed bits of mountain forest, to the first tinkling stream, and
to the first chalice anemones and pink paint-brush flowers. We washed
and we dressed, and we slept and washed again, and put snow inside our
hats--for the morning had become rapidly hot--and we descended. The
streamlet foamed down its rocky bed, and we waded and jumped and clung
to its sides. And other streams flowed into it and made it deeper and
the current stronger, and it splashed us above the waist. We waded
knee-high through pools where shadowy fishes darted, and we sat to rest
on shiny rocks in the water and talked of desirable foods. We scanned
the map of the Geological Survey and stared at our compasses and
considered the contours of the hills, and at length were rewarded by
the sight of a real human horse trail with indisputable hoof-marks upon
it.

* * * * *

WE found this in the afternoon, and for three hours followed doggedly,
without meeting a soul. At last, to our great joy, we came upon a
trivial enough thing, and that was a piece of candy wrapping. “Those
who eat candy do not stray far from the place where candy was bought,”
said I sententiously.

“Well argued, sir,” said Lindsay. “I fully agree.”

And, indeed, before sunset the happy augury was fulfilled, and we found
a camp much used by Montana fishermen. Curiously enough, though all
other wild things are preserved in the National Park, the fishes are
allowed to be caught. In our opinion, however, after some experience,
the fishes do not stand in need of protection.

At the camp we resumed acquaintance with the human race in the person
of the keeper and his wife, a fire-ranger, and a hired maid called
Elsie. They filled up our cans and gave us a pail of boiling water to
wash our clothes, and thread for our trousers and coats, and a week’s
rations to take us to “The Sun.” They were disappointed that we would
not buy bacon.

“Bacon,” said the camp keeper, “is my long suit.” But Vachel vowed he
had gone over to the Mosaic point of view, and didn’t care if he never
tasted bacon again.

Instead, we “filled up” with corn-beef hash and took into our packs
raisins and grape-nuts and butter; double quantities of bread and
sugar and milk, and nine packets of comforting lozenges. And we saw by
the Spokane _Advertiser_ of some remote date that the King and Queen
of England had been to Ascot races in person, and no one knew what
was happening in Ireland, or whether De Valera was a Protestant or a
Catholic, and the fire-ranger confessed he did not know the ins and
outs of Sinn Fein. And no, there had not been a forest fire this year
yet, though he evidently lived in hope.

* * * * *

SO the poet and I fortified ourselves materially and spiritually, and
set off again for the North-west. We started on our new rations and had
one of the most jovial of meals in a place where evidently people had
once camped before. We found the charred circles of old camp-fires in
the grass.

While we were resting under the trees, and in the gleam of the
firelight, Vachel told me the story of how once, in Kansas, he “ate
down” his landlord. He had hired himself out with a gang of others
to harvest the wheat on the land of a certain German farmer. All the
week-days they “piled the golden sheaves,” and it was a red-hot July.
The men ate as much as they were able, slept in barns on the hay
when the day was done, slept like the dead, rose with the dawn, and
certainly did bring in the wheat. For this they got two dollars fifty a
day and were proud of their gains.

On Sunday, however, work was suspended, and the gang just lazed and
dozed and ate. The German was a pious Catholic, and said a longish
grace before and after meals. As the gang were rather sheepish
regarding religion, they generally let one course pass, just to avoid
the grace, and came slouching in as the meal went on. But Vachel
started in with the first grace, right level with the farmer himself.
Whatever he had Vachel had. He had several helpings of everything on
the table, and as each of the ten harvest hands came in Vachel started
afresh with him, and as he had hash he had hash. As each man thought he
had done, he slunk out so as to avoid the second grace. The farmer kept
piously waiting for all the men to get finished, and helping himself
with them, too, just for company.

At last all seemed to have finished and gone, and the farmer was about
to pronounce the final blessing when he had an afterthought and took
another piece of pie. So Vachel also took another piece of pie. Then
mechanically the last grace was said. “I went over to the barn and lay
down and slept,” says Vachel. “By supper time I was ready for another
meal, and I sat down again with the farmer before the rest of the gang
had arrived and grace was said. The farmer was about to help himself
when suddenly he paused, spoon in hand, and sat back in his chair,
looking ill.”

Then, in a loud, stentorian voice he called to the kitchen: “Wife, give
me the pain-killer.”

He had a violent fit of indigestion. Wife then brought a large bottle
labelled PAIN-KILLER, an astonishing bottle, about a foot long, that
looked as if it might be horse liniment, and the farmer took his dose
with a large iron spoon. “A terrible stuff,” says Vachel, “a stuff that
just eats the inside out of you, one part turpentine, three alcohol,
and the rest iron rust. It gives you such a heat you forget about your
indigestion.”

So the farmer had his pain-killer, but he did not eat any supper, and
the poet and the rest of the gang as they came went gaily on and ate to
the end. “I began with each man as he came in and ate him down,” says
my hungry companion suggestively. “And the farmer, tasting nothing, had
to wait till all were through to say the final grace. We finished at
last and went all of us to the barns to sleep till Monday morning and
the hour when we returned again to the golden line.”

_The kiss by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others,
Does not compare with the imaginary meal
You eat when the wallet is empty.
The kiss too, when you get it,
Oft proves a disillusion;
But the first meal after an involuntary fast,
Well!
It takes a real poet to describe that!_

[Illustration]

X. CLEAR BLUE

AFTER telling me how he “ate down” the farmer, Vachel rested and passed
into a halcyon mood. We had a heavenly day climbing towards a heaven of
unclouded blue. Swinburne flowed more naturally from the poet’s lips
than conversation:

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran.

His thought soared with our steps.

As the sea gives her shells to the shingle
The earth gives her streams to the sea,

he declaimed to the streams. I promised to arrange a Swinburne recital
for him next time he came to England. For I soon found that he knew as
much Swinburne by heart as he did of his own poetry. Ellery Sedgwick
wrote me from Boston that to tramp with a poet would be “Some punkins,”
and one may say it was when the poet all day long was a living fountain
of verse. I had but to mention a poem and Lindsay poured it forth to
the skies. We bathed in a waterfall in the heat of noon, which was also
a Swinburnian joy, and we splashed in melting snow whilst our shoulders
were burned by the sun and inured ourselves to sun and ice.

The sun literally blistered the skin, and we reclined in it on scarlet
shelving rocks and cooked our luncheon. All the while Vachel recited
Swinburne’s “Ode to Athens,” addressing the walls of a great mountain
cirque which drooped in snow curtains and hanging gardens of silver
water.

Up there came to us after lunch a yellowish-grey animal with sprawling
hind legs and stupid benevolent snout and whistled at us--_fee-fo,
fee-fo_,--a whistling marmot. As I tried to approach him he snuggled
off to the snow-field whence he had come, disappeared under the crust,
and presently reappeared from a hole in the midst of the snow and began
chasing chipmunks in and out of the snow holes.

* * * * *

WE resumed our journey upward, and all was well. The grass was emerald,
the paint-brush was bright ruby. Swallow-tailed butterflies aeroplaned
to our feet. The valley was broad and clear without mystery or horror.
The waterfalls hung like the gardens of Babylon. An opal lake below us
changed and waxed in iridescent glory and caused whispers of rapturous
interest. And the mountain we were on was the one of the great figure
nine made of snow, which had so thrilled us and appalled us when we saw
it afar at night some days before. When we had gone to the top of it
we had reached the great divide, where the waters flow north, south,
and west toward Hudson’s Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific.
At least, so the topographers assure us, and we must take their word.
Vachel says we will not wait for rain and see the rain-drops hit the
mountain-top and divide automatically into three parts.

So we descended at dusk into a verdant valley, with low trees growing
wide apart, and waist-high flowering daisies and basket grass, and
sunflowers--all as fresh and fair as if gardened for us yesterday.
There were serried ranks of flowers. The tall mullein stalks became
so thick that they looked like a wooden fencing in the twilight.
Looking upward we saw a crimson mountain, a brown mountain, and a green
mountain. Looking downward, afar, we saw many forests, separated by
streams, sleeping before us. And we slept in a thicket and were made
music to by the nymphs of the seven waterfalls of Shadow Mountain.

* * * * *

VACHEL LINDSAY belongs to a sect of primitive Christians called
“Disciples of Christ.” They are followers of Alexander Campbell, and
are called “Campbellites” in America, much as members of the Catholic
and Apostolic community are called Irvingites in England. They are
akin to the Baptists, being emphatically “immersionists.” Among other
notable people who belong to this brotherhood is Mr. Lloyd George, and
it has been suggested that the British statesman be asked to address a
general convention of the Disciples if he comes to America. The chief
virtue in the sect lay doubtless in an attempted return to primitive
historical Christianity in all its simplicity. Not that the poet is
a narrow sectarian. How could a poet be? But he has drunk deep of
the primitive spirit in Christianity, and is very near to children,
negroes, Indians, and the elemental types in men and women. He loves
oratory more than reason, and impulse more than thought. Hence, no
doubt, the well of his poetry.

We talked of the modern cult of mediævalism and the Chesterton-Belloc
group as we resumed our tramp, and we discussed G. K. Chesterton’s
visit to America. Lindsay felt that Chesterton counted for a great deal
in America. He was not merely a celebrity. He had the reputation of
a Socrates eager to converse with youth. But when he came to America
he did not really come. “He has been Barnumised as Oliver Lodge
was Barnumised,” said the poet. “It’s the worst of commercialised
lecturing. Literary lions are imported by speculative impresarios and
then put to the American people entirely from a dollar point of view.
The organisations that can pay five hundred dollars for a visit get
their Chesterton. But how about the universities and colleges and small
groups, the real intelligentsia of America--the people who have a
creative interest in what a thinker and critic has said and in what he
says? A similar mistake was made with Alfred Noyes, who was booked as
the man who made poetry pay. It created a false impression and did much
injury when there was an opportunity for great good.” Vachel Lindsay’s
idea is that two or three literary men and women should be chosen each
year as the guests of the nation, and that they should be sponsored by
the magazines and the universities. In that way they would meet the
American nation and not merely the brassy front of American business.

* * * * *

WITH this subject we plunged through the rank undergrowth of the
forest, following our north-westerly way, which should bring us to
St. Mary’s Lake and the steps of “Going to the Sun Mountain.” We
gathered our first potful of black currants and stewed them with sugar
for our luncheon, and we had our daily dip in the rushing waters of
Red Eagle Creek. It was a warm valley, and the west wind, surcharged
with moisture from the Pacific, had expressed itself in a great floral
exuberance, in ripe raspberries, currants, and gooseberries, and in
forests of firs, which lay against the steep mountain-sides like
feathers against a bird’s wing.

Vachel indulged his passion for the West and all that the West means
to an American. He has memorised at some time or other the map of
the United States, and can draw it and put in all the States in a
few minutes. He drew it on a scrap of paper as we rested at sunset,
putting in the far Western States first--Washington and Oregon like
two sugar-boxes on top of one another, and then the key-shape of
Utah, whose southern line is roughly the southern line of Colorado,
Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia, and whose northern line is
the northern line of California and Nevada, and approximately of
Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

“California,” says he, “is a whale swimming around the desert of
Nevada; Idaho is a mountain throne and its curve is the curve of
Montana. Wyoming fits into the angle of Utah. New Mexico is under
Colorado, and its capital, Sante Fé, is the spiritual capital of
America. Texas plunges southward like a root--don’t draw it too
small. Oklahoma is a pistol pointing west. Nebraska is another
pistol pointing west. North and South Dakota are western blankets.
Louisiana is a cavalier’s boot. Illinois is like an ear of Indian
corn. Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa move westward with the slant of
the mountains and the rivers. All America, as you will see, has a
grandiose north-westerly-south-easterly direction or kink caused by the
Rocky Mountains primarily, and by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers
secondarily. The Rocky Mountains control the continent. That is why we
are travelling north-west. It is quite natural. It is America’s way. It
is written in her rocks and by her waters.

“As the families migrated from Virginia to Kentucky and Illinois and
Minnesota--so we go following nature’s trail out to the wilderness.”

[Illustration]

_North-west, north-west!
Give us north-westerly breezes.
Let us be mad north-north-west,
Rather than southerly sober and sane.
Some one once wrote on a madhouse wall,
That the madder we were the nearer to God;
The saner, the further from Man.
God give us the divine kink
North-north-west, north-north-west,
When you can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw,--
Hamlet only became Hamlet when he learned the secret._

[Illustration: YOU HAVE COME TO BE ALONE WITH YOUR HEART]

XI. NATIONAL WILDERNESSES

GLACIER in Montana, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Sequoia and Yosemite in
California, Grand Canyon in Arizona, besides Mount McKinley in Alaska
and many minor reservations and national forests--they ought truly to
be called by some name other than parks. The same also is true for
Canada, which possesses its wonderful Dominion Parks such as those of
Waterton and Lake Louise. The name “park” has evidently been given to
popularise them. Such places in Russia are called “wildernesses,”
and are resorted to for meditation. They are called literally “empty
places,” the same word that is used in the Bible for wilderness.
Tolstoy when he died was on his way to the wilderness--to the “Empty
Place of Optin.” In England, in our conventional phrase, we should be
likely to call them “retreats,” like the retreat on the Island of Iona.
But the idea is that they should provide in our life what is meant when
it is written: _The Spirit drove Him into the wilderness_; or _He went
up into the mountain to pray._ In the midst of the hurly-burly comes
the happy thought--“I will arise now and go to my wilderness, to my
retreat, to my empty place.”

The spiritual background of Great Britain is in the mountains of the
North, among the Cumberland Lakes and on the wild border. Or it is in
the obscure grandeur of the Sussex Downs, or on Dartmoor, or on the
Welsh hills. Small though the mountains may be, they are continually in
the minds of English people. The way of escape is clear. And many of
the bright spirits of England and Scotland have derived their strength
direct from the hills. Byron and Scott and Ruskin and Wordsworth drew
their strength from the hills. Carlyle super-imposed Ecclefechan upon
Chelsea. Even he who once said “London’s streets are paved with gold”
was driven by the spirit from Battersea to Buckingham. I find a belief
in the wilderness strong in Vachel Lindsay. He holds that the wild West
has been and still must be the spiritual lodestone of American men.
Untamed America has remade the race. Andrew Jackson was the voice of
the West of his day, Abraham Lincoln of his. And though New England
has held the hegemony of letters he divines that the wilderness--the
mountains--will be the source of the inspiration of the coming time.
Early America derived most of her inspiration from across the Atlantic.
Her heart was outside her body. But mature America, conscious of
herself as a whole, will know more surely that she has a heart and a
soul and a way to God in herself.

* * * * *

I LOOK to a time when national wildernesses will have an acknowledged
significance in our public life, when men and women of all classes of
life will naturally retire to them for recreation--as naturally as
people used to go to church on Sundays and for a similar reason. All
praise to the foresight and energy of Franklin Lane, the late American
Minister of the Interior, that enterprising Canadian who did so much to
bring the people’s heritage before their eyes!

The “See America First” is a poor slogan. It is like “Do Everything
Once” and “Buy him a Fountain Pen.” The question should be raised to a
higher level. People need not visit Glacier as they visit Switzerland,
in a spirit of curiosity. Even in this sophisticated age they can
come as pilgrims of Nature as easily as they can come as tourists.
“Triangular trips,” “Four-day tours,” are not in the right spirit. Time
is immaterial.

But there is virtue in shoe-leather, virtue in the saddle of the horse.
Not much virtue in guides, in hotels. You come to these places to be
alone with Nature or you do not arrive.

* * * * *

SO much for the idea and possibilities of the national parks. Lindsay
showed me a portfolio of descriptions of them when he was in London,
and he did much to persuade young Englishmen interested in America to
visit them, go tramp in them. And though of course we had heard in a
dim way of Yellowstone Park and of the Indian reservations both in the
United States and in Canada it was a novelty for us. But Englishmen are
born trampers and lovers of the wilderness, and are ready to reverse
the American proverb--Why walk if you can ride?--and put it, Why ride
when you can walk? And I shall not be the first Englishman to seek
refreshment hiking through the wild places of the West.

We talked of this exuberantly as we clambered through the forests on
the side of Little Chief Mountain, and it was still our theme in the
evening when we lighted our fires in a vast rock temple and chasm down
into which tumbled dark water, glittering and hastening as it flowed
downward to the valleys. How to say a word for national wildernesses
in this sedentary era of the world’s history, how to say a word for
true religion and quiet and the things of the spirit! Vachel Lindsay
will no doubt dramatise the subject in one fine Western epic some day,
and I make my appeal, as I have done before, in prose, as for the
wildernesses of Europe, so also for the wildernesses of America. But
whether we write or sing of what we feel or see, one thing is sure when
we are done--we shall have lived apart and tramped and meditated upon
the mountains and far in the wilderness and it will mean something in
our lives.

[Illustration]

_What wish you to-day, dear tramp?
What wish you for brother-man?
Why, just this:--
The quality of mountain-sides in the colour of his eyes,
The deep of stars in the lake of his soul,
Feet that have learned to leap,
And a spirit that longs to fly.
That’s what I wish, dear brother, to-day,
Said the tramp._

[Illustration: THE SUN SEES EVERYTHING]

XII. GOING WEST

WE love inspirational phrases such as to “go West” which sprang on to
men’s lips in the Great War, and was a way of saying “to die,” which
was startlingly poetic, seeing that it came from the soul of those
masses usually admitted to be so vulgar. “He’s gone West,” men said
with a hushed voice, meaning that like so many who had passed before,
he had gone--to another world, to beyond the setting sun. The phrase
was not current among the American soldiers, but I have heard of an
equally wonderful expression used by the mountaineers, who said: “He
has crossed the Great Divide.”

My mind is inevitably drawn to these thoughts as we face so often the
setting sun, as we cross the pinnacles of our momentary aspirations,
the passes, the divides which separate sky from sky and valley from
valley.

Lindsay is also constantly enwrapped by the romance of Going West--the
historic and poetic Western movement which has pulsated humanity since
the hordes and their caravans stampeded across Asia in the days which
are almost before history. What was it, what is it that hypnotises
us--is it not the sun which, rising in the morning, calls all his
children after him all day and bids them follow when at last he plunges
into night and nothingness?

* * * * *

“HAVE courage,” says the sun in the evening. “Have faith,” say the
stars all the night long. “You see, I rise again; you will rise,” says
the sun in the morning. “This way, this way,” he says till noon, and
“Follow, follow,” all the afternoon, and then once more, “Behold! I
go. Have courage!” he says in the evening again. And that sets young
hearts a-beating, that kindles the poet’s flame and enlarges the spirit
and makes the way of the world.

That makes us all nomads, all gypsies, all pilgrims. That draws the
steps of the willing, and even the unwilling find themselves borne
along by a human tide and a sliding sand of time--away to the west and
the night and the other country. No one can stay, even if he will. In
time all must go, all must follow the sun and cross the Divide and go
down the slopes of the unimaginable other side and be with the stars
in the long, hungry night, the myriads of stars that never do anything
else but look down on human souls and ask of us and stare at us and
dream of us. The night of stars for all of us, and then with our Father
and guide, far o’er these mountains, wan and tired, but gleaming
and then resplendent, we lift our eyes to the other country, the
dreamed-of, hoped-for country--and it is morning and we are still with
the light that we followed yesterday.

* * * * *

“THE old prairie-schooners,” says Lindsay, “blundered forward on the
western way, day after day, season after season, sometimes for years,
for the pioneers often worked their way to the Virgin Land which they
had taken for goal. Often, indeed, they died on the way, they broke
down on the way. Each yearned to the West even as they failed and threw
their spirits westward, like Douglases carrying the heart of Bruce to
the Promised Land. The primitive instinct for moving was awakened by
the road and many a pioneer found happiness in the going as much as in
the attainment.”

We ourselves are going westward now, rather than north-west, and the
sun beckons us. For the mountain we are now setting out to reach has
been called by the Indians “Going-to-the-Sun.” It stands over and
beyond St. Mary’s Lake and climbs heavenward in gigantic steps of
stone. It steps from the forest to the rocks, from the rocks to the
snow, from the snow to the sky. It is a mighty cathedral, standing in
the midst of prosaic mountains, surely one of the most beautiful and
majestic of these mountains, symbolic in its shape and its ancient
name. We have slept on the mossy earth at the foot of the pines. We
will arise and go to the sun.

[Illustration]

_There’s some one calling you:
Arise, sleepy-head,
Arise from your bed!
A messenger is peeping,
There where you’re sleeping:
For the day’s been begun
By your master the sun,
And you surely will follow._

[Illustration: CROSSING THE GREAT DIVIDE]

XIII. CLIMBING RED EAGLE

WE journeyed through the primeval forest without a trail to guide us,
through the jagged, thorny, tumultuous pine wilderness. It was not so
easy for Lindsay, whose legs are shorter than mine, but he took it as
a game of banter leader and moved forward doggedly into the openings I
made. We were glad to take advantage of the thousands of wind-smitten
trees which lay dead, piled at every angle and piled on one another.

We climbed upward for miles on the white, smooth, dead timber of fallen
trees, balancing and jumping, transferring from trunk to trunk, and
clambering over the immense stars of upturned roots. We were rewarded
at length by a view of the rocks above the tree line and of a tumbling
cascade. This was in the direction we required and we made for it
and lunched by the cascade become rivulet, and then climbed all the
afternoon by rock stairs to the snow.

At six beside a “bride-veil waterfall,” we had supper. Above us was an
amphitheatre of red rocks and ruined slate and it seemed but a small
climb to the top of the mountain. The gradient was steep and there were
large quantities of loose stones. We climbed without intermittence
until 9 o’clock at night, and as one top was nearly conquered another
top seemed to be added. The amphitheatre receded upward to heaven.

How arduous it was and at times how risky! Massive stones on which we
relied to place our feet proved to be only passengers like ourselves
upon the mountain and at a touch from us resumed their downward track,
clashing and smashing from rock to rock. We came to steep banks of
shale which moved _en masse_ with the weight of our bodies and we lay
flat on them and slid with them unwillingly and fearfully. Nevertheless
we did make great progress upward, and if we did not conquer the
mountain on which we were we at least conquered some peaks that
were behind us. We entered the society of the mountains. The mighty
eminences and august personalities of the southward view came into our
ken.

* * * * *

THE sun went down, the shadows below us deepened, the snow banks
multiplied themselves in number, and their outlines and suggestiveness
intensified as the valley whence we had arisen lost its trees and
changed to a vast blank abyss. Our unfailing wonder when we sat down
on a stone to regain our lost breath was the multitudinous terrain of
awful, wrathful mountain peaks which in indescribable promiscuity had
climbed the horizon wall to stare at us.

Vachel confessed to being dizzy and dared hardly look downward whence
we had come. He preferred to look upward, and it was always “three
more dashes and we’ll be there,” though instead of three we made thirty.

Our mountain at length seemed to show the last limits and to be crowned
by a sort of Roman wall. We came in view of a long, serried, level grey
rock which ran evenly along the mountain brow like a fortification, and
in the midst of it was a way of stone steps and a gap. I got up through
the hole in the wall and hauled up Lindsay’s pack after me, and he
followed.

But when we got on top it was flat, but it was not the top. We lay
full length there and ate raisins and looked upward over another field
of shale and loose boulders, and a cold wind as from the Pole swept
across. We watched the first stars appear and talked of finding a
sheltered ledge somewhere and sleeping on it or at least waiting on it
till morning. But secretly we still had a strong hold on hope. Mountain
tops are only to be conquered, and we would not give in.

* * * * *

“THE other sky beyond the mountain ridge is on tiptoe waiting for us,”
said I.

It should be explained that the mountains here are nearly all
“razor-edges.” When you have climbed sheer up to the top you have to
climb sheer down the other side. Plateaus and table mountains are rare.

The mountain “cirques” and ridges actually cut the great sky in two and
you can only join the two pieces of it at the top.

However, when, after another forty minutes of picking our way upward,
we did actually reach the summit no new sky greeted us. Indeed, I
shrank back aghast from the dreadful view that I saw. For the mountain
swept downward in long, swift and severe lines into a funnel of Erebus
darkness. We stood perched at a gigantic height above the world, and it
was black night with an abyss both behind and in front of us.

You could stand on the top of the mountain and see the two dreadful
views, on the one side scores and fifties of wrathful, staring
mountains and on the other a purgatorial abyss for lost souls.

We dared not start a descent so we slept on the top of the mountain.
I lay on a narrow ledge and slumbered and waked. And Vachel, who was
hypnotised by the abyss, would not lie down for fear he might fall off
or might get up in his sleep and jump. So he sat like a fakir the whole
night long, looking unwaveringly on one fixed spot.

“Our friends all lie in their soft beds with their heads on pillows of
down,” I thought, “far away in the valleys and across the plains, in
snug, comfortable homes, and we lie on rocky, jagged edges on the very
top of a great mountain, far from human ken.”

We seemed as much nearer the stars as we were further away from
mankind. Venus was like a diamond cut out of the sun, and she lifted
an unearthly splendour high into the sooty devouring darkness of the
night. In other parts of the sky the meteors shot laconically in and
out as if on errands for the planets. Cold winds ravaged the heights,
but they did not roar. For the forests were far away. And there was
no sound of waters--only the long slow threatening roll and splurge
of loose rocks continually detaching themselves from the heights and
slipping downward to perdition.

I lay and I lay, and Vachel sat unmoving, and we heard, as it were, the
pulse of the world. We did not see humanity’s prayers going up to God.
We only saw the stars and the night.

[Illustration]

_If you join the mountain-peak club
You’ll notice the old members stare at you,
Call you silently a parvenu, interloper, upstart.
Upstart you are, of course,
But never mind, you’ve got a rise in the world.
No use trying to outstare the mountains
Sitting in their arms-chairs, nursing their gouty feet.
Be a social climber still,
Aspire higher,
And be put up as soon as you can
For the club of Heaven’s stars._

[Illustration: WHERE THE ANTELOPE WILL GO THE BEAR WILL FOLLOW]

XIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE

BLESSINGS for dawn and the rosy lights and for the cloudlessness of the
morning! Had mist enshrouded us we should have had to have remained
high up on the slippery knife-edge of the mountain till the mist had
passed. We were able to descend, cautiously, cautiously, for three
hours in a trackless precipitous zig-zag to the red peak of a lower
mountain and a high snow-bound lake, where we made a good fire and
made coffee with our last coffee, and lay down again and slept. Then
we washed in the snow and ceased to be old weather-beaten tramps and
recaptured our yesterdays and our youth, and Vachel began to sing again
and our knapsacks felt lighter, as indeed they were, for we had eaten
up all the rations, even the iron rations.

Then we walked to the valley of the Sun Mountain adown the rocks of a
continuous cascade. The descent to the snow-bound lake and the red peak
had seemed impossible, and we essayed the impossible again. It was not
merely a polite walk downstairs. Every step that we took was a problem.
We used our hands and the strength of our wrists as much as our feet
and the tension of our ankles. Constantly were we faced with fifteen
to twenty-foot drops on to narrow ledges, where a balance must be kept
when we alighted.

No doubt I am by nature a mountaineer and hillsman, half a Highlander,
at least, and Vachel’s genius is the genius of the plains. I am an
antelope and he is a bear, we tell each other.

“You lead,” says Vachel. “Where the antelope will go the bear will
follow after him, but the antelope will not follow the bear.”

So he followed downward, and we took the most abominable chances of
breaking our legs or our necks--we had to take them. Then presently we
came to what seemed a full forty-foot sheer drop of foaming water--an
impossible descent, you would say, for all the grasp and grip in it
was water-washed and water-smoothed by ages of water--impossible,
impossible. But no, face it, think it over, it can be managed. O
caution, caution! Trust yourself to the Almighty Protector and grit
your teeth!

* * * * *

TIMIDITY fought daring all the way down. We sat once or twice, and
regarded the view. One thing was certain: we could not climb back to
the places we had come from. If we did not continue downward we had to
remain where we were.

We did things which one does not do without guides and ropes and the
paraphernalia of mountaineering, and when we got down to the tortured
fissured rocks below the cataract we looked up whence we had come and
said again to ourselves, “Impossible, impossible!”

And as in going up the mountain the winning of the summit was
continually deferred, so in descending to the valley we only conquered
one steep mountain slope to be presented with another steep mountain
slope and another series of terraces and another impossibility.

Perhaps no one ever came this way over the mountains unless it was some
adventurous Indian, but even Indians do not venture where horse cannot
go. I remember as one of the most remarkable passages of our descent an
hour we spent in a subarboreal channel shut out from the light of day,
a jagged downward plunge where the stream fell away in darkness while
in voluminous curves the thick sallow roofed it in. We made a hanging
descent, clinging to handfuls of branches of sallow and swaying and
sagging and dropping, and then touching rock with a dangling foot, and
then clutching another lower bunch of branches and letting ourselves
down again, downward, downward.

* * * * *

BUT it all ended well, for we came at last to sheets of sliding
shale and then to a spacious forest. And we had been saved from all
mischance, and the silence which danger had gradually imposed on us
was broken.

“Bread, beauty, and freedom is all that man requires,” cried Vachel,
“and now I’ll translate it into fire, water, and a place to sleep.”

These we found, and one by one the stars discovered us when they peeped
through the branches of the lofty pines. They saw us where we lay
now far away below, stretched out beside the embers of our fire and
luxuriating in its warmth like cats.

We boiled a pot of black currants and wild gooseberries and we ate
it to the last berry, though, as the poet said afterwards, it was
a quart of concentrated quinine. And we made a rosy layer of wild
black-currant candy in the frying-pan which was not allowed to remain
long unconsumed. We had no food in our knapsacks, only a little sugar,
but we counted ourselves happy though hungry because we had been up on
top of a great mountain and had come down.

“A joy to the heart of a man is a goal that he may not reach,” says
Swinburne. And a greater joy still is the joy of reaching it. That is
what we have been doing all day.

“Call it ‘Doing the Impossible’ and thinking well of ourselves,” adds
the poet when I read this to him:

[Illustration]

_“My master builder!” said the lady
When she made the master builder
Climb to the top of his new building,
Risking his life and doing the impossible a second time.
She made him do it, but he doing it was a hero.
He showed his manhood to her
By doing something that could not be done.
“The impossible or nothing” be our cry.
Don’t you loathe the perfectly possible?
I do._

[Illustration: SWEET LADIES DO STOP ROLLING YOUR EYES]

XV. PEOPLE IN CAMP

A DAY’S steady tramping brought us to a camp, and then we bathed in St.
Mary’s Lake and washed every separate item of linen, even that which
we wore, and we sun-baked ourselves on the hot beach while the clothes
dried, and we made a clean appearance at last among fair women and
brave men, and we took supplies on which to vagabondise for days on the
slopes of Going-to-the-Sun Mountain.

It was a curious experience to be absolutely alone on the mountains so
long and then suddenly to come on a large congregation of tourists.
Going-to-the-Sun Camp is a spectacular point in the recognised tour of
Glacier Wilderness.

“We are doing the four days’ tour,” is the common explanation which
visitors gave us. Or, “We are making the triangular trip.”

One’s eyes naturally rest on the ladies, who are nearly all in seeming
male attire, and some of this attire fits and some does not; some of it
suggests homes where men are rare and breeches have to be imported. But
they all look pretty well in this simplicity. Girls in mauve and violet
jumpers, shiny leather belts, and leg-o’-mutton breeches sit with us
at supper and explain that to-day was their first day on a horse--and
they know it. “Are you tired?” say I. “You can tell the world,” is the
reply. Near us stands a girl in tan riding costume, violet stockings,
white shoes, and bobbed brown hair in a hair net. She is talking to
two well-built youths, standing with their legs apart, and the girl,
imitating their styles, droops forward to them as they chaff one
another. She will not stray far. The same may be said of a well-fed
lady of sixty, pampered and neurotic, but sitting in a riding jacket
and very baggy breeches and nervously smelling at an ammonia bottle.
Grandma in trousers is rather portentous.

But how describe the charm of the little boy and girl, children of
twelve and thirteen, accoutred also for the horse and sitting on their
steeds with the grace of Indians. The old and middle-aged are stiff and
only the children look as if they could never get tired. In any case,
all is good humour and jollity. Mme. Censure is not here. There are
people with crumpled faces and there are people made of dimples and
curves--but happiness holds all.

* * * * *

WE did not see very much of the tourist life. There is not much of it
up here. There ought probably to be more. While Yosemite, Grand Canyon
and Yellowstone are visited by hundreds of thousands of Americans,
Glacier is left unused. We do not want its canyons also to be filled
up to the top with cans, but no one would grudge a few more people in
a wilderness where you can travel weeks without meeting a soul--a few
more sharers in the loveliness of the Northern Rockies.

A number of camps have been made with log-cabins and canvas tents, and
there are two large hotels on the fringe of the wilderness. But an
especial charm lies in the fact that the people in charge of the camps
and the little inns called “chalets” are mostly university students
and college girls of the institutions of Minnesota and Montana, and
they do the needful work on the self-help principle of earning a little
money in their holidays to pay their way during term. There is nothing
of the low commercial spirit, no one hanging around for a tip, no one
with any interest to treat you shabbily, but instead the natural good
manners of unspoiled people. You see the choleric “colonel” trying to
get more than his share of attention and service, but he doesn’t effect
anything, and you may see the millionaire cheerfully and shrewdly
recognising the fact that he must take his turn after his stenographer
and perhaps after a couple of ragged old tramps like ourselves.

* * * * *

VACHEL is devoted to the universities and high schools of America
and the life they represent. He has almost completely changed his
constituency from the “ladies’ club” and the heavy society of Mr. and
Mrs. Leo Hunter and is now a poetic voice of young germinal America.
He has “covered the map” of the United States singing his songs to
college youths. And in return college youth recognises him quickly. He
is a natural favourite among those who run the “chalets.” And they all
wanted him to “sing” to them.

Not that the visitors do not also make friends with us and we with
them. Such coats of sunshine as we have make ordinary sunburn pale and
give us much glamour. Souvenir huntresses grab us from a “big ballyhoo”
Western town. Likewise, a girl from Chicago, pronounced in three facial
contortions. And when we set off to vagabondise for some days we were
followed by a beautiful creature who wished for a minute to come with
us to the world’s end.

[Illustration]

_The tramps have gone to sleep
Nearer to the skies;
Oh ladies, sweet ladies,
Do stop rolling your eyes.
The tramps have gone away
To seek their paradise;
Oh ladies, sweet ladies,
Do stop rolling your eyes.
The tramps have taken with them
The best of apple pies,
They’re not prepared to-day
To take on extra ties.
So ladies, sweet ladies,
Do stop rolling your eyes._

[Illustration: ST. SERAPHIM
HE IS ONLY A WILD BEAST WHEN TREATED LIKE A WILD BEAST]

XVI. VISITED BY BEARS

I RETAIN very cheerily in mind from Russia the memory of the typical
Russian saint who lived in the woods and was so holy that the bears
approached without malice and took what the saint could spare of the
store of crusts on which he lived. The unfortunate Tsarina when she
desired so religiously a male heir, went to the shrine of Seraphim in
the “empty place” of Arzamas to pray for one. And the most famous
thing about St. Seraphim was his love of the bears. He is nearly always
depicted in popular oleographs feeding the bears with bread, and in
Russian ikons the bear is the national emblem of the primitive nature
of Russia and the saint is the emblem of Christ.

On the other hand, I remember also my good old friend Alexander Beekof,
a hunter of bears who had himself snapshotted facing in the snowy
forest the upstanding, snarling, dangerous beast which presently he
was to lay low. And since we are thinking of bears, I call to mind how
I saw last winter little baby bears, dressed up in ribbons and fed
with milk from a pap-bottle, hawked for sale by refugee Russians from
street to street in Constantinople--pets to put in the nursery with
your children, astonishing little rompers and ideal players of hide and
seek. I have wondered about the bear as we wonder now about the Russian
as to just what sort of an animal he is. Is he only a wild beast when
treated like a wild beast, but otherwise tame in the presence of saints
and children? Or is he a wild beast all the while?

This problem we evidently went to the Rocky Mountains to solve. For
there we met the bears, and even if we may not have the haloes of the
saints we hope to find a place among the children.

* * * * *

NOT that we were entirely ready for the overtures of Brother Bear, and
it is true that we frightened some bears away, but later we got on good
terms. I saw the first bear on “Going-to-the-Sun” Mountain. No one, of
course, is allowed to shoot bears in Glacier National Park, though it
is not many years since hunters hunted them there with Indians and with
dogs, and one may read of the bear-hunting adventures of Emerson Hough
and others. Now without dogs or guns the bear has been won over and he
has ceased to fear mankind.

It was a beautiful morning and Vachel had been sitting in Baring Creek,
letting Balchis, as he called the waterfall, flow over him, and he was
now lying in a blanket on the ferns and meditating when I heard an
unwonted stump, stump, crash, in the undergrowth.

“Is it a man?” I asked.

Crash, stump, stump, it went again, and peering through the trees I
saw a black bear coming towards us, glossy and shaggy. I called Vachel,
but at that the bear stopped short, raised his intent, listening ears
and then made away from us in another direction. We saw no more of him.

After that I recognised the sound of the bear’s feet in the forest,
quite a characteristic sound, and we knew there were many bears. But
the next occasion of a personal encounter was some weeks later near
Heaven’s Peak. Vachel had got himself an extra long wisp of old canvas
from a ruined tent. We slept by a large fire, and when the fire went
out a bear came to us. Vachel and I were lying close to one another
and both had our blankets over our faces, for it was cold. Vachel, as
he told me afterwards, was awakened by something and lay listening to
my breathing. He thought to himself, “Stephen is certainly making a
terrible racket; he must have a cold”; and then he thought again lazily
and unsuspectingly, “Stephen surely must have caught a cold to be
snuffing and snorting in that way.” Then he thought again, “He seems to
be moving about, I wonder what he’s doing.”

* * * * *

THEN Vachel put his head out of his blanket and what should he see
standing beside us but a big black bear. As for me, I was sleeping like
a babe, and the bear apparently had been snuffing at me to see whether
I were live meat or dead meat. Vachel gave one terrific shout. “THE SON
OF A GUN,” said he, and I wakened up.

“Wake up, Stephen; it’s a bear,” said he. At this Brother Bear walked
across from my side, where I had a pile of boiled eggs, which he had
scattered, and leisurely began to knock our tin cans about on the other
side and try and find the ham which we had bought the day before. In
a most unsaintly way we drove him off. We forgot the example of St.
Seraphim, and Brother Bear was fain to depart. I repented too late
and followed the old scallywag up the moon-bathed forest glade quite
a way. But he would not be called by his pet name after the abuse
we had hurled at him and went away and away till he was lost in the
moon-beams. “He was smelling you to find out whether you were good
to eat,” said Vachel, laughing. “He wouldn’t begin on you unless he
were sure you were carrion.” “Curious,” said I, “isn’t it; we used as
children to look at pictures of bears smelling men who were shamming
dead in order to escape being eaten by them. In children’s books, the
bear won’t eat carrion. Out here in the Rockies you can’t keep them out
of the garbage cans of the camps at night.”

On another occasion, however, when three bears came trundling down
after our supper was over, I approached one with some bread, which he
very gently took from my fingers, and I scratched his nose and put
myself on speaking terms.

“Curious,” said I to Vachel, “is it not? These are the same bears which
used to figure so largely in adventure stories of the Rocky Mountains.
It follows they are ready to be good citizens of the forest if treated
‘good.’”

You’d have had a different experience had they been grizzlies, we were
told later.

Maybe. But St. Seraphim himself did not tackle grizzlies.

[Illustration]

_So we’ve met the bear:
The bear has snuffed at us
And wondered what we were.
Humans with a forest smell to us,
No doubt quite game;
Sleeping out too, very quietly.
Good to eat no doubt,
Dare one, dare a poor bear take a bite?
Would they mind?
I’ve bitten most of the animals in the wood
Except them--
In my time._

[Illustration: ELEMENTS OF GOOD COFFEE

MOSQUITO
NETTING
WATERFALL
COFFEE POT
FIR TREE
COFFEE BEANS
STONE
PYRE
LOVE]

XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE

THE wind blew all night long, a wind that seemed to be cleaning up and
burnishing all the spaces between the stars. The rock wall against
which I leaned my back kept stealing away the warmth from my blanket.
Vachel slept off the level on the ferns, at a forty-five degree tilt
downward. We both looked out to the mountains and the stars, and it
was an epical summer night on the Rockies.

The mountains were compact and black and clear, and a dim light behind
them glorified each. A young moon arose and poised herself above us,
and only slowly and very unobtrusively crept across the sky. It was a
night of persistent gale but of a steadfast starry universe. It seemed
to call for rain, but there never came a cloud, only the metallic
interstellar spaces grew lustrous and more lustrous, and the mountains
more and more romantic. Our eyes were religiously and adoringly
spellbound. Our hands--our feet--that is a different tale.

Their hearts were pure,
Their hands were horribly red,

as Balzac said of two young ladies of France.

Vachel, who had tied the tassels of his old steamer rug together and
made a sleeping-bag, was meditative of Peary and Shackleton and their
companions, and though he had procured an extra flannel shirt and
had tied himself up in all he possessed, he still could not find the
temperature at which corn ripens in central Illinois. We heard the
waters of the creek pouring down below, we heard movements among the
trees, and the idea of a bear coming to us was not unsuggested. Vachel
picked up his steamer rug and came across to my rock and laid him down
nearer to me. We slept then till dawn, slept with one eye open and one
shut; one ear alert, the other muffled.

* * * * *

THE lovely light of the east flooded upward and over us from Lake St.
Mary, bathing our mountain-side in a peach blossom glamour; small birds
winged it through the wedge of air ’twixt mountain and mountain. The
creek poured more loudly into our consciousness, and the sharp points
of our rocky bed jibbed upward towards our bones. Then it was morning.
Then it was coffee time.

I shall never forget the poet as he looked in the dawn, with his red
handkerchief tied over his old felt hat and under his chin, and the
concentration of his gaze as he plodded about in three pairs of socks
and half-laced boots seeking extra twigs to make that fire burn. He
looked like a true dwarf or old man of the woods from a page of a
fairy-book, but not really visible to human eyes.

And it was an unpractical fairy who expected damp wood and large wood
to burn as easily as dry withered pine. It sometimes took a long while
to set our pot a-boilin’. Once, however, that had been achieved, great
was our reward. We had our coffee, “Lindsay’s stone coffee,” as we
named it, better than any other coffee in the United States.

* * * * *

“STEPHEN,” said Vachel quietly to me one day, “you must let them know
just how this coffee is made. I’m not one of those selfish people who
keep such secrets to themselves. The ladies especially will like to
have our secret.”

The first point is that you take a stone which has never seen either
sunset or sunrise, a stone lying at the feet of trees not less than
100 feet high. It must have lain there not less than 4000 years and
listened to the music of a waterfall. That is the important point. Any
decent coffee beans ground in any kind of clean grinder will do. A pot
that has seen more than one continent is preferred.

You then cut a square piece of white mosquito net sufficient to hold
the coffee and the stone. Tie up carefully like a plum-pudding, but
leave seven or eight inches of string attached to it so that you can
pull the coffee sack up and down in the pot at will. Vachel in this
matter of coffee is a complete immersionist. The coffee must go right
under.

It is prepared, moreover, in silence and without fear of flame and
smoke. The pot stands on a funeral pyre, and is allowed to lift its lid
several times before a hand swathed up in a towel darts in to rescue it.

We pour it out into our tin cups. It is black, it is good, it has a
kick like a mule; it searches the vitals and chases out the damps; it
comforts the spine and gives tone to the heart. And the poet, silent
hitherto, sits holding his large cup before him. Then he takes a sip
and looks at me.

“Thadd touches the spadd,” says he at last in a deep gastronomical
gestatory voice which seems to lend expression to his ears and
shoulders. “Thadd touches the spadd,” says he in happy relief.

[Illustration]

_Coffee should be made with love;
That’s the first ingredient.
It’s all very well about the stone,
Say I, but it needs a heart as well.
The coffee knows if you really care,
And will do its best if you lend it encouragement.
You can flatter the coffee whilst it is in the pot,
And it will rise to your persuasion.
But the commonest cause of coffee being just indifferent
Is your indifference towards the coffee._

[Illustration: TO THE WORLD’S END]

XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD

AFTER an era of drawing maps of the United States my companion took to
drawing maps of the world, supporting them by mermaids and making them
fly by north-westerly and north-easterly angels, and he wrote original
couplets and hid them in hollow trees and under stones. As Shelley made
paper boats in the Bay of Naples he made maps and hid them--his pet
hobby for a number of days.

One verse asked Atlas if he did not find the world heavier since the
Treaty of Versailles.

“I hope you made a copy of it before hiding it,” said I.

“Oh, no; stray leaves of poetry, rewards for seekers,” said he.
Celebrated mountaineers have been putting copper boxes with their
signatures on the tops of the mountains this year; Vachel has been
leaving original poems in the valleys.

We set off from Sun Mountain for the high walls of the Canadian line.
Vachel was in no passion for climbing, and confessed that if he were a
woman, he would, at this point in our adventure, “lie down on the floor
and scream.” So our progress was slow and punctuated by long waits. We
went through tree thickets and breast-high flowers and through tearing
thorns, and we came to many red-rock promontories. Rocks grew up out of
the jungle and topped the highest trees, and we climbed them and looked
out from their smooth, wind-swept summits and listened to the bears,
and Vachel, with paper and pencil, drew maps and put Czecho-Slovakia
in the scheme of things, and asked the God who made the world where
Turkestan might be.

* * * * *

AT length, at noon, we came unto a mighty cliff, an end of the world,
rosy red and flamingly joyful, but very final. The poet was a quarter
of a mile behind me, and I watched him patiently grubbing his way
through the exuberant green, trackless jungle, hit in the face by
branches, choked up to the fork of his legs by the weeds. And when he
came to the end of the world he asked no questions but just sat down
and began drawing a map. “Where,” asked he, “is Seven Rivers Land and
the Desert of Pamir?”

I left him sitting down below and began climbing the giddy cliff with
a tin can in my hand. For growing like wall-flowers on the rocks above
were dwarf raspberry bushes all hung with tiny rosy lights--and these
were fruits. I got up to them and standing on half-inch ledges and
holding to twigs and weeds I picked a cupful of the hot berries all
half-cooked by the sun’s rays. And when I got down again we had a
wonderful repast of raspberries and sugar.

When we resumed tramping we crossed a crag-strewn valley, which was
very rough on our boots. My boots were cracking; Lindsay’s were very
floral. His held out a little while longer, but mine died that day. As
we each carried two pairs of boots we were prepared for the emergency.

Mine had been a stout pair of pre-war boots (Americans please read
“shoes”). I used them first in North Norway and Russia. I tramped in
them in France. They were repaired first by a Russian at Kislovodsk
in the Caucasus; repaired for the second time in Georgia by a negro
cobbler. For I did Sherman’s march and walked from Atlanta to the
sea in them in 1919. And they were repaired for the last time by a
Frenchman in Hazebrouck last year. I had tramped in them over the
battlefields of Gallipoli, and had worn them when the weather was bad
in Constantinople, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, and almost every
other capital of Europe.

“We must burn them,” said Vachel, “and have a special ceremony. These
are no ordinary shoes (Englishmen please read ‘boots’) to be abandoned
in the wilds without the meed of some melodious tear.” So we burned
one on a high flaming fire with young pine-shoots for incense, and the
other we threw into a rushing mountain torrent, and bade it continue
its world journey to the world’s end.

* * * * *

WE lay stretched on our blankets by the pine fire that night and talked
of the world. We arrived at some ideas. “You are not drawing the map
merely as part of a geography lesson,” said I. “You are drawing the
poetry of it.”

A poetical map of the world has never yet been drawn. “It should have
ships on its oceans and lighthouses on its rocks and mermaids under it,
and stars over it,” said Vachel. “Imagine how Blake would have drawn
it.”

First, you put in the North and South Poles, symbols of man’s love
of the inaccessible and the paradox of his striving life; then Cape
Horn, stormiest point in the world, cape of innumerable wrecks, of
the innumerable adventures of daring sailors. Then put in the Panama
Canal, symbol of utilitarianism and our modern life. Draw in the Bering
Strait, which is the pre-historic link of the Old World and the New,
and then the Rocky Mountains, which the red men climbed.

Then draw in a dotted line the keel track of Columbus over the ocean
and put an eye upon a peak in the Darien looking downward and outward
to the great Pacific. Draw the Mason and Dixon line. Draw 54° 40´--the
“fifty-four forty or fight” line. Then for the old world, make the
coast-line of China and then mark the Chinese Wall built to keep out
the Huns, then draw the caravans of the hordes, and may arrows fly
over the desert of Asia, spitting against Bokhara and Samarkand,
spitting against the empire of Darius, spitting against the Scythians,
the Slavs, stampeding the Goths and the North Men and ruining Rome and
starting the modern world!

You must put in Athens the birthplace of the ideal, and Marathon and
then Rome, the birthplace of materialism, the capital of capitals, seat
of the Caesars. And then St. Helena, symbol of the doom of would-be
Caesars.

Mark in the mysterious Nile, and the place where the Sphinx looks out
from the sand. Mark Bethlehem and then Jerusalem----

Thus we schemed and mused and made many maps in fancy, and we took
to ourselves just before the stars said good-night the title Geo.
Ast.--geographical astrologers.

“I dare you to register as such,” said Vachel, “when we get out of all
this and reach a hotel at last.”

[Illustration]

_Poor old world, you’re a playground.
And we are the children who romp in you now.
Those maps of you are wrong
Which show trade winds
Instead of winds of inspiration,
Where names of business-places are in bold black print
And railway lines are ruled,
And capitals are marked with blots
And other places are invisible._

[Illustration: THE EAGLE SEES WHAT IS IN THE PIT]

XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW

“WITE man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” cries Vachel playfully from
behind me as we get out of forests and up among the naked rocks. “Wite
man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” or again, “You might as well kill a
man as scare him to death.”

“This is no place to bring ladies,” I ventured.

“And no place to bring a poet, either,” says Vachel. “Look here,
Stephen, I make one rule. I’ll only be scared out of my wits once a
day.”

The poet riveted his eyes on me, and I was a curious sight, being torn
to tatters from head to foot. I had been mending my trousers with the
stuff of my vest and the lining of my coat. “Stephen,” cries Vachel,
“when I get tired of looking at the scenery I look at your pants.” And
I employed much time when we rested sewing up the triangles and flaps
on my knees with white thread drawn from our mosquito netting.

We saw now the wonderful cathedral-shaped mountain behind us, blue
and white and scarred and crumpled. It lifted its clerestory with
grandiosity up into the colder and rarer air. Its rivelled snow hung
in great white copes; its earthquake rents and chasms yawned, and
its dreadful steeps, up which no man ever climbed, drew sternly and
austerely up to summits and spires and towers. Grandiose mountain! And
what little flies, what microscopical insects we were upon it!

* * * * *

WE came to the top of the Valley of Boulder Creek, stretching away
from the heart of the Rockies to the tents of the Indians and the
indeterminate plains, one of the grandest of views to my companion, who
loves the prairie like the prairie child, an aperçu of America seen
from the mountains. “That is what we want to get,” said Vachel, “a
Rocky Mountain point of view on all things American. That is the true
meaning of calling it a national park.”

“Not only that, but a world-point-of-view can be found,” said I.
“That is why it was called Going-to-the-Sun Mountain--the sun sees
everything.”

We turned, however, into a wild and obscure region and blundered and
staggered among a miscellany of all kinds of boulders. Blue lakelets
and pools lay at the foot of djinns of snow, and there were dreadful
iceberg-like reflections in the weird blueness of the water. We
camped on a plateau, or rather in a wide, high trough surrounded by
mountain-sides, and we made a fire of old resinous roots and stumps of
dead, dwarfed trees. There were shallow lakes in sight, but the way
to them was over undulating, quaking moss. Mists encircled us before
nightfall and made our fire ghostly. We lay all night in a great
stillness, and the fire glowered and smouldered and the mist uneasily
crept into rain with a breeze or settled again into mist with the calm.
Next day was a cold and chilling morning like November in England,
and we heaped higher the fire with wood and slept till wind and sun
conquered cloud and damp. And that was nearly noon.

* * * * *

“ONWARD,” cried Vachel, “upward, higher, purer, better, nobler,
sweeter, stronger”--which was his favourite war-cry at the time, and
amid stark upper-mountain scenery we made a glorious afternoon march to
a place of great height. At length, on what seemed a terrifically high
pedestal of black rock, we gleaned a coffee-pot full of fresh snow and
proposed to make tea. And I upset the evaporated milk, but licked it
up off the rocks with the flat of my tongue. This Vachel was too proud
to do, so I have surmised that his progenitors were Lowland Scottish
gentlemen farmers, but mine were Border cattle thieves and “land
loupers.”

We had supper that evening in a great, open mountain space, with
glaciers as large as cities brooding and impending over abysses,
and we looked downward to dark and gloomy rising forests gone tired
on their way up towards us, and we looked upwards to the grandeur of
snow-covered crags and tumultuous, heaven-climbing waves of rock.
Vachel fried the beans to an accompaniment of rhythmical remarks.
Poetry possessed us both. All about us was in grand, romantic, heroic
strain. Vachel remarked how the forests were like harps with long harp
strings, and the strings were the lines which mountain stones and
avalanches had furrowed there for ages. The carpet on which we lay was
of yellow vetches and dark-blue gentians, with lichened stones all
interspersed. Heaven itself was not flat-roofed above us, but raised
at the zenith, a blue vault above us, like the dome of a world-temple.
And the fire burned a black patch on the green and puffed and flamed
symbolically as if we were children of the Old Testament sacrificing
there to our God.

[Illustration]

_Two stars arose above the mountain’s head,
Two stars looked down upon the world in bed;
Looked through the window-panes and saw the world at home,
From Babylon to Tyre, and Rome to Rome.
What if the stars, lifting their tiny lamps,
Were but like us, a couple of old tramps?
Heaven’s tramps the stars, blazing their trails they go,
From mountain-top to mountain-top and snow to snow._

[Illustration: ‘I HAD RATHER BE A PEACOCK THAN A HOG’ SAID THE PEACOCK]

XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE

MANY years ago one of the Springfield newspapers offered a prize to the
reader who should send in the best answer to the question: _What would
you do with a million dollars?_ Young Vachel sent in an answer. His
was: “I would change them to dimes and have them thrown into the State
House yard and any one who wanted them could come and take as much as
he liked.” The answer was printed in the paper with a lot of others and
gave considerable offence. The telephone was kept busy that morning by
those who thought fit to tell his father and mother that they ought to
look after him better and not let him make a fool of himself.

“I did not get the prize,” said Vachel sadly. “The editor probably
thought that with a million dollars one could do just a million
dollars’ worth of good. He thinks, as does my dearest friend, that
you can employ people to do good at a salary, and the one who got the
prize probably allotted ten thousand dollars to this charity and ten
thousand dollars to that and endowed this thing and endowed that and
did not even dare to buy himself an ice-cream soda. They’ve got such a
high idea of money that it’s almost an attribute of God himself. Now, I
rank money low. I’m right up against the weekly magazine advertisement
point of view--‘Doing good is only possible when you’ve a lot of money.
Get money! Oh, get money first somehow, then you can do good. Wear good
clothes and then you’ll be in the way of doing good.’”

* * * * *

WE had made our camp under a great overhanging rock beside rushing
cataracts. The huge vague scenery about us was made more immense by a
cloud screen which prevented one knowing exactly how high the mountains
were, and we looked outward at a vastitude of scarred precipitous
cliffs. Our fire warmed the rock against which we had laid our
blankets, and we had found a delightfully cosy place in which to be at
home. Night came down upon us, but we lay long in the flamelight and
talked.

“I don’t think,” said Vachel, “that this money incentive is really a
strong one or leads far. That is where I part company with the radicals
of this country. They have all founded their faith on the economic
theory of history. I’d like to write for them a ‘romantic theory’ of
history. I believe in the romantic theory; I do NOT believe in the
economic theory.”

“All right, dear Vachel,” said I constrainedly. “There are only you and
I present, and God. Say it more quietly.”

“Vanity and ambition have always been stronger motives than the desire
of gain. And that is good. I put vanity a whole lot higher than greed.
In a country of hogs the peacock is a praiseworthy bird.”

“You say that because you are a peacock.”

“I KNOW IT. I AM A PEACOCK. I AM NOT A HOG.”

“All right, Vachel. Now, if money is not so strong an incentive how do
you account for the fact that in your own beautiful State of Illinois
Governor Small has been under arrest for appropriation of funds, and at
Chicago members of one of the greatest baseball teams in America are
under trial for selling championship games to the other side?”

“That’s the influence of the magazine advertisement--praise of dollars
and the implication that everything in the world has a commercial value
or it has no value. And there are no other honours but money honours.”

* * * * *

IT was evidently more that a mere opinion of my companion. It was a
creed. He passionately believed what he said. And thus it was that I
discovered in Glacier wilderness a very rare bird, the American black
swan, and that in the poet of Springfield whom the village in its
ignorance was once scandalised about.

Vachel told me how he acted on his creed--What is greater than the
power of money? why, contempt of money--and set off without a dime to
see America and live, and how the good God took care of him until he
got to California. “In that way I learned to respect myself and to
respect my fellow-man,” said he. “I learned what a lot of good poor
men and women there are in America. And I have nothing to complain
of individuals as such. I could always rely on brotherliness. But it
was different with institutions, when I went to people who were not
themselves but hirelings, people hired to do good. Don’t I know the
minions of charity? What are the places where as a tramp I’ve had the
stingiest treatment in the world? Why, in institutions from the paid
organisers of charity.” And he told of how he once went to a Y at
H----, Mo., and the fight he had to get mere soap and towel and a bath.

“By Gosh, they weren’t going to give it to me. I said ‘I’ve been a
Y.M.C.A. worker myself in New York for years and I know that soap and
towel can be had. I know the whole workings of the organisation and
I’ll have soap and towel from you if I have to bring the roof down.
I’ll go to the editors of the newspapers. I’ll go to the leading
ministers and preachers of H---- and I’ll hold you up to shame to the
town. I’ll whale you.’ And I got soap and towel and they said, ‘take
him down,’ and I got a bath, though I used as much energy to get it
from them as would have served to do three days’ hard work. Now I know
that if I had gone into any working man’s home in town and asked for
it, or even into a hotel I’d have got soap and towel without demur.

“Yet my best friend says, ‘Vachel, you’re morbid on the subject of
money.’ I said to him ‘Well, there’s a lot in the New Testament about
it. Look it up!’”

[Illustration]

_The gopher-rats are sitting on their tails
Watching us all around, listening to us.
What is it these queer birds are getting excited about
By their camp fire?
Money, is it? Money’s no good to the gophers,
Leave us a crumb or two.
Don’t forget a spot of that fried hash:
Squeak!_

[Illustration: WE CLIMBED UP WITH THE TREES
BUT CAME DOWN WITH THE WATERS]

XXI. DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN

VACHEL told me once, to save his self-respect, he took a job in Chicago
in a department store at seven dollars a week, and was employed in
the wholesale toy department; a whole block of toys, where was to
be found every imaginable plaything for young and old, from dolls
as large as three-year-old children to family portrait albums that,
having a musical box in their binding, played “The Old Folks at Home”
and various hymn-tunes when you opened them. He told how a lad called
Timmins wound up all the albums he could lay his hands on, and laid
them open and went away to another part of the building, and of the
wild din that ensued.

Timmins was “fired.”

He told how he lived amid acres of dolls and how, to satisfy the fire
insurance inspectors, a three-foot clearance was made between the top
of the toy heaps and the roof, and how all one night they did overtime
slamming down rows and sections of dolls and toys on to waiting trucks,
and they were rushed to another place. Then the inspectors came and
passed the building. And when they were gone the Ghetto came and bought
the “bum dolls” from the “smash dump,” and Vachel and the rest were
soon building toys up to the roof once more.

* * * * *

“BUT none of my friends liked my earning my living in this way. They’d
prefer to see me in a bank or an insurance office. You see, I could not
paint a picture that would keep me. I would not enter commercial art--I
mean advertisement drawing. My poems did not sell, and people thought
I had spent long enough studying and loafing, and that I ought to begin
to earn a decent living. So I went into the Chicago Department Store.
They did not like that. So I took to the road again. Curiously enough,
Francis Hackett took a job in that same store before his star arose.”

Vachel and I had a great pow-wow by night and morning fire, and I
cannot set down half here in these (I hope) dignified paragraphs. But
all the while we sat and talked, the prairie rats sat about us on their
tails and haunches, and stared curiously with their forepaws on their
chests like good masons in their rituals. They smelt the beans, they
smelt the cheese, they smelt the corn-beef hash; they knew they were
protected by the United States Government and they had never seen a dog
or a cat. Curiously friendly little companions!

After the cloudy night there was a serene morning. When the veils were
lifted off the mountains we knew them for just what they were. They did
not go all the way to the sky after all.

We went down Cataract Mountain the same way as the water, down to
flower-spread meads and spacious fir-woods and widening streams.
Up above us the water chariots came racing behind white horses four
abreast, five abreast, natural fountains played on every hand, and
high as heaven itself tiny cataracts tipped over and fell downwards
into veils, into smoke, into nothingness. Characteristic of the place
were the great volumes of water which plunged under hollow snow-crusts
to emerge forty feet lower down after a momentary vigil in the snow.
This is the valley of Cataract Creek, bounded by lofty and perhaps
impassable rocks, but in itself a garden to the last patch of mould and
the last bright flower.

* * * * *

WE made our way along Haystack Butte toward Mount Grinnell, which, like
a mighty fortress, stood facing us in the line of our tramp. Was it the
beauty of the garden or was it the limpidity of the streams that set
us talking of England? It is a peculiarly happy subject with the poet,
who, with all his Americanism, has a true reverence for the fountain
of English. This July, just before setting out for the Rockies, he
received an invitation from Robert Bridges, the British poet laureate,
to become a member of the “Society for Pure English.” To that extent
has Oxford at least recognised that Vachel Lindsay is no mere performer
or charlatan and not the “jazz-poet.” To some people in England Vachel
came as a prophet, and his courtly and, indeed, stately manners,
the profound obeisance which he made with his hat before entering a
church or a school or a house, revealed him as an American of the
Washingtonian cast.

Some would-be cynical, smart undergraduate was showing Vachel King’s
College Chapel at Cambridge, and said to him: “The last American we
showed round when we asked him what he thought of it, said, ‘Some
God-box.’” And he seemed to think that very amusing, and could not
understand Lindsay’s silence on the point.

“He did not know for how many years I had lectured on the Gothic and
what it meant to me,” said Vachel.

Naturally, I chaffed my companion not a little on his belonging to
the S.P.E., and called him to order whenever the arduousness of our
campaign prompted him to break across the pure classic of Shakespeare’s
tongue, and I made him take note of many expressions, such as “being
wished on,” and “handing a man the canned goods,” which I bade him
chase from America into the sea.

“I should only be too glad, Stephen,” said he, “if I could get rid
of ‘motivate’ and a man’s ‘implications’ and ‘the last analysis’ and
‘the twilight zone’ and ‘canned metaphor’ and the dollar adjectives, a
‘ten-million-dollar building’ and a ‘million-dollar bride.’”

[Illustration]

_Oxford has asked Chicago
To lend its purifying aid
To the King’s English.
O Oxford! O Bridges!_

[Illustration: THE INVISIBLE PLAYMATE JOINS US]

XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”

“NOW, Horace Greeley----” said Vachel, opening his “morning strafe” of
political conversation.

“Who the ---- was he?”

“You don’t know? Why, you’ll be saying you don’t know Shakespeare next.
That’s as if J. C. Squire had never heard of Edwin Booth.”

“Well, who was he?”

“He edited the _Tribune_ throughout the Civil War.”

“That all?”

“He said, ‘The way to resume is to resume.’”

“That all?”

“He said, ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,’ and
printed it at the head of his newspaper every day.”

“Oh! Did you ever hear of Mudford?”

“No.”

“What, never heard of Mudford, the famous editor of the _Standard_?”

“No.”

“Ever heard of Nicol Dunn?”

“No.”

“He edited the _Morning Post_ in its better days. Ever heard of
Frederick Greenwood?”

“No.”

“Never heard of Frederick Greenwood? Why, he was the greatest
journalist England ever produced. He inspired Disraeli with the idea of
buying the Suez Canal. If we don’t know about your journalists, I see
you don’t know about ours.”

The battery was silenced.

* * * * *

WE walked through five miles of rotten-ripe red raspberries and
got thorns in our half-naked knees and carmined our fingers with
raspberry juice, and we kept spitting out unpalatable fruits and making
uncomplimentary remarks. Then we got to open pine woods and freed our
feet of the tangles, and Vachel began to sing softly to himself a
children’s processional hymn:

We are the Magi,
Children though we are.
We are the wise men,
Following the star.

“There are only two of us.” I ventured. “Where do you think the third
king has got to?”

“That’s King Christopher,” said Vachel, sadly. “That’s our ‘other wise
man.’ He is with us, but he’s invisible. He is sitting in Greeley
Square or Vesey Street, and it was thinking of him that really started
me on Horace Greeley.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he said to all the young Magi, ‘quit seeking a star in the East,
Go West and grow up with the country. Get into America; find your
spiritual roots.’”

“You want to persuade every one to cross the Appalachians?”

“Yes,” said Vachel dreamily. “So I brought him along invisibly. He is
our invisible playmate.” And he resumed his children’s hymn.

“You’re a good bit like Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling,” said Vachel to
me at last, “You’ve a wonderful geographical background. You ought to
read the life of Mark Twain. Very interesting. He was made by his life
in Nevada. His life in the silver mining camps and his knowledge of the
West and the South made him. Read _Roughing It_. It’s a great book.
Then Kipling with a boyhood in India and a maturity in America owes
much to his knowing both West and East. What’s the matter with young
men to-day is a disinclination to get their feet dirty. You’re the only
man in England or America I’ve been able to persuade to go on a tramp
with me. When I proposed it to M----, the English poet, he seemed to
turn pale. That’s all behind me,” he said, “though I don’t know what he
meant.”

* * * * *

WE came within sight of the shore of Lake Josephine. “Shall we ask our
invisible companion if he’d like to come in for a swim with us?” said
I.

“Why, that would be fine.”

So we broke through to the green and silver lake and, putting our
tender feet on the sharp stones and water-covered boulders, waded out
to swimming depth and we made a great splash with Napoleon’s beautiful
bride. And when we came we vagabondised on the shore for the rest of
the day--the three of us--lying stretched out beside a mounting red
blaze of rain-washed wood.

The beach was all of little mauve stones which we raked into couches.
And there we lay munching hot pea-nuts and rebuilding the world on a
foundation of the American Wild West. Vachel drew some more world-maps
and adopted our invisible playmate as a member of the society of
“astrological geographers,” and we took for our emblem and device the
map of the two hemispheres with the motto, “The World is My Parish.”

What a serene evening it was by the side of fair Josephine! A half
moon rose over us at nightfall and marsh hens sped through the air
in volleying groups of wings. The stars and the moon threw a silver
radiance on the line of the mountain-tops and on the forests and on
the dimples and lines and circles of the lake. We fell asleep and were
warm and at peace. We only waked at four in the morning and then bathed
before sunrise and mingled our bodies with the perfect reflections of
green and grey and brown and snowy mountain-sides.

The sun arising grew upon us and chased wraith-like mists across the
waters, and our fire, hotter than the sun, blazed on the mauve stones
and baked us and dried us when we came out to it, and gave us our
coffee and gave us all we needed till old Sol was radiant o’er the
scene.

[Illustration]

_We know about Josephine
What Napoleon did not know.
He was too preoccupied sacking cities
To love the beautiful altogether,
Killing men, counting cannon, putting unneeded
Crowns upon his brothers’ heads.
He didn’t know much about her,
O no!
He said there were no more Alps,
No more Pyrenees.
He never said there were no more Rocky Mountains._

[Illustration: THE CHRISTIAN BECOMES SUN-WORSHIPPER ALSO]

XXIII. THE SUN-WORSHIPPER

“I DRINK to America as she was before 1492,” said Vachel, lifting high
his coffee cup.

“I drink to her as she was before the Red Man came.”

“And I drink to her as she was before the Mound-builders came----”

“And I drink to her as she was in the days of the mountain-top tribe
when a man and his family lived together on a mountain-top and the
rule was one peak to one family, and the eagles were tame and carried
the mail.”

“And I drink to Noah’s fourth son, who was so naughty he was not
allowed to bring a wife into the Ark but carried a pine branch under
his arm. Is there any more booze i’ the can? Yea. Very well; I drink
again to Noah’s outcast son who wandered in these parts before the
mountain-tribe arrived.”

“Is there any more of this most excellent coffee?”

“There is, dear Stephen, one last kick in the bottom of the pot.”

“Then I drink to the Lady of the Lake whom Noah’s son was obliged to
marry and to the cut-throat trout that were their offspring----”

“Enough, enough! Is there any more booze?”

“Not a suck, Sir.”

“Alas!”

* * * * *

THE reader will perhaps surmise that we are approaching the Canadian
line and that my anti-saloon companion has fallen for what they make in
Alberta.

But no, we have been made drunk with words; it often occurs, and with
Lindsay’s stone coffee. The stone in the mosquito-net coffee bag has
spoken through us. It is a piece of the Rocky Mountains, and they
know all there is to know about the mysterious mound-builders and
mountain-tribes. How gauntly and savagely these old mountains have
looked on at no-humanity and for how many thousands of years! “What
went ye out for to see?” said Vachel presently when we had hitched
on our packs. “Not a reed shaken by the wind! What went we out into
Glacier Wilderness for to see? Why, _man_, a prophet. And there’s a
prophet in these mountains who can tell us a good deal about the old
world. We ought to settle many things about the world before I get back
to Springfield and you get back to London. Everywhere you have been I’m
going to assume I’ve been also. Now, at our next sitting let us drink
to Russia--Russia as she was before the Bolsheviks.”

“As she was before Peter the Great,” I added.

“As she was before the hordes.”

The subject was too dark after all. I felt we should have to drink,
not to the past, but to the Russia that is going to be when the
Bolsheviks have been forgotten.

“And England?” I asked. “Will you not drink confusion to the enemies of
King George V.?”

* * * * *

“OH, no,” said the poet. “I’m too good an American for that. Couldn’t
do that. My roots are too deep in democracy. Confusion to the enemies
of King George--no, couldn’t drink it. Confusion to the enemies of the
English people. Yes, I’d drink that toast.”

“Well, it’s the same thing.”

“Doesn’t sound so.”

“In that case,” I retorted, “I’ll not drink to the President.”

But Vachel had become preoccupied and began an unending chant of
Patrick Henry’s oration,

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet,
As to be purchased by chains and slavery--
I don’t care for others, but as for myself
Give me liberty or give me death!

No doubt he did not quote it quite correctly, but I fastened
on the third line, which I repeated deliberately after him,
“I--do--not--care--for--others,” until he was once more moved to mirth
and got down from what in one poem he has called:

The old Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist soap-box;
The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box;
The Karl Marx, Henry George, and Woodrow Wilson soap-box.

And we washed off our politics from our minds at high noon in a river.
And Vachel sat astride of a giant tree that had fallen across the
stream, and luxuriating in the heat he cried out to me, “Gosh, Stephen,
I’m a sun-worshipper with my shirt off!”

[Illustration]

_Quit drinking coffee
Before it’s everlastingly too late;
Be not found among the coffee-bibbers!
Silence those profane toasts
To Noah’s offspring and Patrick Henry.
Oh, Uncle Sam,
See how thy children go
To the devil--drinking coffee!
O prohibit it!_

[Illustration: THE BIRD CATCHETH THE EAR OF THE PRIMITIVE MAN]

XXIV. TWO VOICES

MY companion has two voices: one is that of a politician, harsh and
strident, the other is that of a Homeric harper and ballad-chanter of
the days of old. The political voice does not please me much. It is
the voice of the “hell-roarer” of the prairies. Lindsay loves a mighty
shout, an exultant war-whoop for its own sake, like any Indian. And ...
I’ve heard those “glacier boulders across the prairies rolled.” I have
heard the “gigantic troubadour speaking like a siege-gun.” But there is
another voice--

Two voices:
One was of the deep,
The other of a poor old silly sheep.
And ... both were thine!

as G. W. Steevens once wrote. The other voice is truly of the deep;
sonorous and golden, murmuring, and with eternity dreaming in it. That
is the voice of the poet.

Some days with us were naturally dedicated to poetry. The steps on the
mountains caught the rhythms, the gliding waterfalls and the intensely
coloured listening flowers suggested the mood of the poets, and then
the peaks, the grandeur, uplifted Lindsay’s spirit. The hymns were
silenced. Silence hung on the mute figures of Bryan and Altgelt. We let
Roosevelt sleep on. American and European civilisation ceased to fill
the mind, and there was only the mountains and poetry. Vachel knew by
heart whole books, and he crooned and chanted as we walked, and lifted
his head up to the snows and the waterfalls and the skies. He has a
bird-like face when he recites; his eyes almost close, his lips purse
up and open like a thrush’s beak. He glories in the word of poesy, and
entirely forgets himself--

Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamàkura.

he chanted over and over again like a prayer, as if those hushed and
holy mountains on which we looked were Buddha, Buddha at Kamàkura. And
then--

To him the Way, the Law, Apart
Whom Maya held beneath her heart,
Ananda’s Lord--the Bodhisat.

For whoso will, from Pride released
Contemning neither man nor beast,
May hear the Soul of all the East
About him at Kamàkura.

Yea, voice of every Soul that clung
To Life that strove from rung to rung,
When Devadatta’s rule was young,
The warm wind brings Kamàkura.

My eyes had no doubt often passed over these lines without realising
their beauty. The printing of a poem is only a guide, a clue to what
the poem really is. It is not the poem itself. You have to divine the
inner mystery and beauty. The man who can read a poem may help you to
divine it for yourself. And this Lindsay did, making this poem live as
we walked about--about and about. The beauty of the poem almost depends
on pronouncing the word Kamàkura aright. Because we both loved this
song we thought of naming some snowy mountain after Buddha, with the
great plea--“Be gentle!” Be gentle, all of us!

Another poem which became a possession of the heart was that of Sydney
Lanier, little-known in England--

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies,
In the freedom that fills all space ’twixt the marsh and the skies

By so many roots as the marsh-hen sends to the sod,
I will heartily lay me ahold of the greatness of God.
Like the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.

This poet of southern Georgia gave, I thought, voice to a part
of America, and it was a part I had tramped in too, a land of
moss-hung forests and marshes, of marsh-blossoms and many birds.
In that beautiful first verse how the word “secretly” in the first
line enchants the ear, and then the wonderful effect of the phrase
“greatness of God” when taken with wing-flight of birds rising o’er the
reeds!

Talking of the modern poets, we agreed that a poem was little if there
was not sound in it--melody--resonance. We found a common fellowship in
Poe, and my companion rolled forth under a low and threatening heaven
the cadences of “Ulalume,” his favourite poem, he averred.

Browning meant nothing to him, but he was fond of some of the early
poems of Tennyson, especially of “Maud,” which greatly inspired him.
Curiously enough, the latter poems of Tennyson were unknown to him--

On a midnight in mid-winter when all but the winds were dead,
“The meek shall inherit the earth” was a Scripture which ran through
his head,

and the kindred poems among the last pages of the collected works of
Tennyson.

Matthew Arnold had never touched him, but the music of Keats he
understood naturally at sight. Of his own American poets he did not
care for Whitman, whom he is so often told he resembles, but he loved
Longfellow and all such word-music as--

Sandalphon the angel of glory,
Sandalphon the angel of prayer,

all of which he said one day as we were climbing among the rocks.

He began loving poetry by learning it by heart and reciting it for his
own joy, and I began by writing in an exercise-book all the soldiers’
poems of Thomas Campbell and reading them--“a thousand times o’er”--

My little one kissed me a thousand times o’er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart.
“Stay, stay with us! rest! thou art weary and worn,”
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear--melted away!

How precious are the recollections of one’s first love of poetry! If as
a boy you read the “Golden Legend” walking in country lanes when the
hay was cut in swathes in the fields on either hand; if you have ever
lain in the midst of a cornfield and crooned to yourself the exultant
promises of Rabbi ben Ezra, or climbed mountains with “Marmion” in
your heart, or lisped the “Ode to a Nightingale” to the first girl you
loved, how touching it will always be in memory!

The poet and the tramp shared thus their recollections as they wandered
amidst heights and depths. They surely know much more of one another
now!

_I think the poet
Learned to be a poet,
By living with the poets
Till he became a poet._

_He had the great need in him
To give a song a tune.
So he listened how the birds sang
And he began to croon._

_Now he’s singing for a living
And living for his singing.
And his companion’s singing,
And all of us are singing,
Because he’s learned to sing._

[Illustration: THE CLOUDS CAME OUT OF THEIR HOMES TO SEE US]

XXV. STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS

WE scrambled through thickets to Mount Grinnell, which stands like
a gigantic fortress, a bulwark of this world against others. Its
impregnability seemed appalling. Fancy knocking at that door after it
was shut! We stopped and looked up at it, and the sight of it relaxed
our tense human energy and left us with very contrite souls. However,
the nearer we got to it the less it was magnified. Its battlements
receded and we soon had a fly’s view of the mountain, the view which
the fly has when it is walking on the barren surface of the rock.

We clawed our way along the steep entangled shore of Lake Grinnell to a
waste of willow saplings, and a litter of postal packets of great rocks
delivered by the mail chute of the Grinnell Cataract. Here a great mass
of water meets momentarily with calamity and falls over a precipice
like houses falling. At two miles’ distance it is like a picture of
a waterfall seen in a shop window, pretty and attractive. At twenty
yards’ distance it is the awful thing it is. The sun is hidden at noon
and a noise that drowns all other noises is in your ears. The spray
blows turbulently over you like rain.

We had thought to cross the cataract through the _disjecta membra_
of the rocks at its base, and climbed into dreadful proximity, and
advanced our noses inquisitively over the foam. And then very hurriedly
we drew back as if we feared we should be tempted across it. But what
to do? Not surely to retrace our steps? That seemed unthinkable.

We decided to go lower and try to ford the rapids. Vachel thought that
would not be difficult. But I had attempted such crossings in the
Caucasus and knew what it meant to adventure one’s tender body into a
hypnotic, rushing current and a frantic roar of stones. So I went first
and demonstrated it.

And we did get across. With most of our clothes off and stuffed into
our packs, and with uprooted pine saplings for support, we made a
criss-cross diagonal course into the water, which rushed up our bodies
like wild mastiffs, and we were too preoccupied with the rolling stones
and slippery snags and the mesmerising onset of the waters to think
about the chilling we were getting. It was certainly a victory when we
slipped out of the central violence and got into the shallows on the
other side.

* * * * *

WE did no more that day. I had sprained two fingers anyway, and could
not rely on my left hand. So we piled a dead-willow fire beside the red
rocks and talked. The cliff above us went up to heaven, but there was
a recess washed out by the water of that waterfall in some past age.
I am inclined to think that the cataract made the wind which simply
raged round the corner all night long. But we had found a place that
was completely out of it. Also, we got enough wood to burn all night
and cure the cold. For it was cold up here. We built a long barrier of
little rocks between us and the elongated glowing furnace of willow
which we had made. This kept the flames off our blankets and yet warmed
our bodies all the way along.

It was a majestic night, with the screened light of the moon filling
a narrow sky. A selection of heaven’s stars played voluntaries to us,
but the jazz band of the waterfall kept up a grandiose hubbub, in which
were vocal human cries and groans and chatterings--as if it were hell
or Broadway going past.

Vachel could talk above this roar; I could not. So I listened to him
and his cataclysmic accompaniment. It was, I think, on the subject
of Turner and heroic painting. Vachel, and Ruskin before him were
attracted to Turner by the heroic style.

“Scenes such as this beside the waterfall delighted Turner. Just at
dusk it was a perfect Turner painting. Did you ever see that ‘elegant’
edition of Rogers’s _Italy_ which old Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin read with
their child? It is profusely illustrated with vignettes by Turner.
They are all in the heroic spirit and they started Ruskin on his
speculation about cloud-forms and in his idealistic interpretation of
Turner.”

“I love the heroic,” Vachel went on. “I hate the game of puncturing
heroics which people think so clever nowadays.”

I made no objection. A poet whose voice can be heard above the jazz
band is a hero, and my sympathies are not with the flood of the
burlesque--unless, as now, they begin to wrap my soul in slumber’s holy
balm.

* * * * *

NEXT day we went up to the clouds, climbing by tiny steps of rock and
slippery tussocks, and Vachel went ahead and became pioneer of the way.
For it was a left-handed mountain, and I had no left hand that I could
use, and I kept slipping five feet down in making one foot up. I got
left behind, and when I caught up with the poet he was sitting stripped
under a waterfall and leaning against a gleaming rock whilst the stream
splashed downward over him.

It was a day of great moving clouds. Clouds with personalities came
stalking out of chasm bed-chambers, clouds overtook us and enveloped
us. We found November’s home, where sweeping rains cross and recross
on the mountains. We passed near the base of the black and dirty
glacier and watched the clouds smoking over it like a spreading fire.
And presently there was not a particle of view above us except cloud,
and no view below except of the rocks at our feet and the cloud-filled
ravines.

We stood in perplexity. In clear weather it is difficult to get over
the “Garden Wall” from this side. Now we could not see our way any
further. We retired to twin slits in the cliff, stretched ourselves on
our blankets, and gave way to meditation.

[Illustration]

_The clouds came out of their homes to see us;
They had heard of us and had seen us from afar,
Now they could satisfy their curiosity
And find out just exactly who we were.
So they gave us of their hospitality,
Inviting us both to their mountain abode.
Mr. and Mrs. Glacier were at home--a chilly couple,
So were the impulsive avalanches, a family of long descent
And purest origin.
The visitors were mostly ladies of the upper strata of society
Most æsthetically gowned.
They came about us, asked us various questions,
Conventional questions about the weather.
Some new ones came, others drifted away.
We were left by ourselves at the last.
The clouds didn’t altogether like our style,
Our form wasn’t theirs,
We were obviously parvenus, Nature’s profiteers,
Living not on our income but by our output.
The Peaks, their husbands, with their patrimonies,
Were certainly less clever and more stodgy,
But we were clear outsiders, people of a lowly birth,
Not altogether possible, they judged.
So the clouds’ curiosity regarding us abated,
We felt pretty chilly towards the end of the party.
They offered us no tea, though we each had an ice on a wafer.
Proud, supercilious, overweening ladies!_

[Illustration: IF YOU’RE MY FRIEND YOU’RE GREAT]

XXVI. LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT

WE decided to change our direction and make for the camp at the head
of Lake McDermot. This we could hope to reach by nightfall, as it was
downhill all the way. It was moreover a right-hand descent and suited
me well. In an hour of diving and plunging downward we got out of the
clouds and saw that there was fine weather away to the East. We had
moreover found a foot-trail, and, “Bless de Lo’d I’se found de way,”
cried Vachel.

Downward, downward to the low pines, to the large pines, to the giant
pines--how easy it was to go down. I thought we should have little
difficulty in getting to the little log-cabins of the camp, and sleep
dry for once. It was now ten days since we had last had a roof over
our heads. The prospect was pleasant; we thought of the hot supper
awaiting us. We thought of the drying of our clothes and our blankets,
and of a gentle sweet repose of our tumbled and jolted bodies between
white sheets.

The descent, however, suited Vachel as badly as the ascent had suited
me. As a short-legged man he had to take three steps to my one, and he
constantly serenaded me through the evening air--“Steeven ... wait a
minute! Little Vachel’s lonesome!”

I would stop, he would draw level. “Now wait a minute,” he would say.
“Let’s look back! What a wonderful view! Isn’t it a wonderful view?
Let’s sit here awhile and take it in--a _wonderful_ view!”

Or he would let me go on a bit and then stop me. “Stee-ven, look at the
pine-tree, look at the giant tree, giant of the forest, look what a
_great_ giant! Let’s sit down and take it all in!”

In the twilight we got to talking of oratory, which is one of the
poet’s pet themes. He holds that pure oratory is natural poetry. Bryan
is a poet; Patrick Henry was a poet; Daniel Webster was a poet. He
enunciated various famous lines to me, trying to rouse the mountains
with a sort of voice-of-God tone or air-bursting boom which the poet
commands--

Lib-er-ty _and_ Un-i-on ...
One ... and in-sep-ar-able ...
Now ... and ... for-everrr!

and he imitated Andrew Jackson saying--“_The Federal Union! It must and
will be preserved!_”

I found in the poet a curious creed, and that is, that oratory is
better than logic. He preferred the warm glowing orator to the cold
clear logician. He preferred Antony to Brutus, and put friendship above
merit. He justified the “Solid South” in being solid. He justified
Wilson for appointing his friends to power. He considered politics a
matter not of theories but of friendships and family ties. He justified
the spoils system to me. “When a man comes to power--he brings his clan
to power, his friends, the people of the village, and that is much
better than a collection of high-browed experts,” said he. He loathed
detraction and personal attacks of any kind. The commonest laudatory
adjective which he used to me in his conversations about his friends
was the adjective “loyal.” I could not persuade him to talk critically
of any of the literary work of his friends.

“Any poet who is a friend of mine is a good poet!” cried Vachel more
than once. “I’m _for_ him.”

* * * * *

WE came into view once more of fair Lake Josephine, but we could not
make much headway. We were held by conversational webs. The poet was
tired, and at every halting-place he started on some engrossing theme
which beguiled us into spending half an hour sitting on dead trees. He
was in the rôle of Scheherezade talking to her sultan. We ought to have
plunged down to the lake-shore, built a big fire and dried off, but I
was foolishly persistent in the idea of getting to the Many Glacier
camp that night. Presently we started talking of Roosevelt, and the
poet held me by the coat for a whole hour while he explained how he had
been carried off his feet by a Republican, and had defied his family
and voted for Roosevelt and had been struck out of the family Bible, so
to speak.

“I was for him until the end of his Presidency,” said Vachel. “He
refused to give business and high finance the first place, he would
not talk the holy gospel of tariff, he made the White House a national
centre of culture, he gave a great progressive lead, and rallied to
his banner the bright spirits of America; he hit the shams and the
frauds and the trusts; he stood by the Negro; he was not afraid to
express what he thought on any subject under the sun; he did not halt
between yes and no, and he was the very opposite of the Adams type of
politician.”

“But it burned him out,” Vachel went on. “He had a third and last
period when he was not himself, when he acted the young man, and
stage-managed the delusion of endless energy.”

And he told the story of Roosevelt’s last visit to Springfield with
great gusto, imitating Teddie’s mighty stride down through the people
to the platform, the war-cries and yells of the audience, the clash of
the brass-bands.

“And he was not an orator, and he did not believe in the spoils
system,” I interrupted maliciously. “And he did not believe in the
families ruling America----”

No wonder we got lost in the willows.

[Illustration]

_A’m ti-erd, yes a’m ti-erd,
A got th’ bloo-ooes aw-fool ba-ad.
Ma feet is sore;
You’s awful so-ore,
Ain’t ye, feet?
That fellah over the-ere
’S legs is just too lo-ong.
Now where’s he gwine to now?
Where’s he gwine to now?
I’se skeered he’ll leave me here a-lone,
All a-lo-one.
Say, Cap, doan go on so fa-ar,
Say, boss, you sure didn’t see that tree,
You cahn have no feelin’s for the view
Huhhyin’ on so fass--_
(Tired Feet Blues)

[Illustration: SHE SENT MORE RAIN AND LAUGHED AGAIN]

XXVII. THE WILLOWS

WHEN I was at Springfield I was brought before the children of the
High School, where in years past the poet went to school, two thousand
children in a grand auditorium. I think we could show nothing of
the kind in England, an assembly of nearly all the boys and girls
between the ages of twelve and sixteen in the city--white children,
black children, immigrant European children promiscuously grouped,
bright-faced and vivacious and feeling all-together. I was to speak
to them on Russia, but before my turn came the school did twenty
minutes’ practice at the school-yell. For there was a ball-match on the
morrow, and as a young orator cried out to them, “We are going to win
to-morrow. If the school is behind us we’ll win.”

The leaders of the school-yell came out of their seats, and they leapt
like Indians and flung their arms about and writhed and appealed and
struck the floor with the palms of their hands and appealed again.
Thus they gave “The Locomotive Yell,” which reminded me of the voice
of the Purple Emperor Express in Kipling’s locomotive story “.007.”
Thus they imitated a great steam-engine under full pressure of steam,
laboriously and mightily and then victoriously roaring forth from the
Grand Terminal--

Rah ... rah ... rah ... rah--
Spring ... field ... High ... School

(repeated four times with gradual acceleration)

Yea Springfield
Yea Springfield
Rah ... Rah ... Rah.

Vachel was visibly affected. “That’s where I get my inspiration,” said
he. “I just love them to death. I feel as if I’d got a snoot full o’
whisky. I just love them.”

It would be idle to deny that these yells did not raise every hair on
my scalp. It was an astonishing enkindling of the primitive. When I
stood up to speak to these children I felt myself on a mighty friendly
river. I was borne along by a rapturous enthusiasm which had been
started by the yells. The whole school, boys and girls, white and
coloured, were fused in one glowing whole. And Vachel said to me once
more, “There is America.”

What a contrast to England, where the children are not allowed to get
into this rapturous state! If you have faced the critical audience of
Rugby or Harrow, or the restrained maidenhood of a school like High
Wycombe, you realise the difference. If you are a moving speaker the
Head may even ask you “not to get the children excited.”

I was explaining this to Vachel. “Well,” said he, “that’s how it is
in England. The duelling spirit survives. Every one is still on his
guard. The American has thrown his shield away. Most human beings are
incapable of understanding anything till they are moved. That’s how we
do things in America, and go ahead, by whoops and yells--Whoopee!”

* * * * *

ROOSEVELT made America into one man. He mesmerised America. But the
spell failed, and many were disillusioned. His destruction of his own
Progressive party was a terrible blow.

We were walking now in the woods in the dark, and heavy rain had come
on, and we thought we were on a foot-trail and were not, and we got
into a lamentable jungle of devastated pines and wild undergrowth and
water. We walked in a circle, we tore our clothes afresh, we climbed
pitiably slowly over stark dead jagged trees and branches, and Vachel
forgot the subject of Roosevelt and of oratory, and began to make many
suggestions as to the right direction. We got so desperate that I said
to him:

“You think you know the way. Go ahead, I’ll follow.”

He wouldn’t do that.

“All right: you follow me. And no suggestions for twenty minutes. We’re
going to get out of here.”

We then plunged into a waste of tightly-packed willow trees, all about
ten feet high, with branches thickly interlaced. It was intensely dark,
and they soused us with water at every step. It was like breast-stroke
swimming through them. We came to a pine-tree island in the midst of
them, and then after a long struggle forward, as I thought, we came
back to the same pine trees. Then Vachel said, “Let us just lie down
here for the night. When morning comes it will be easier.”

But the ground under us was in slops of water, and rather than sit and
shiver there for hours I was all for getting out, and still believed
it possible. This faith or stubbornness was at length rewarded, for we
came to the water at the top of Lake McDermot, and it was nothing to us
to walk through thigh-deep water for half a mile and ford the river. We
were so soaked with the water of the willows that we must have made the
lake a little wetter.

So we made our way to the palatial hotel which is situated on the
north-eastern corner of Lake McDermot. Bedraggled, hanging in new
tatters and with water streaming into little pools on the floor when
we stood still, we were no people for the hotel. And we read on the
front door, “No one in hobnails or bradded shoes allowed to enter
here.” The many lights shone on our red faces for a minute, and then
we passed on--to the log-cabins of the campers and the hob-nailed
brethren. And there we got a room, and we opened our last can of pork
and beans and ate it to the bottom, and we rung out our streaming
clothes and hung them to dry, and we put Roosevelt and Bryan to sleep,
and the poet and the Guardsman were hushed.

[Illustration]

_The joke was on us and Nature laughed at us,
She laughed at us, she would not help us.
She sent more rain and laughed again,
Swish, swish!
Ha, Ha!
She laughed at us, she would not help us,
She sent more rain and laughed again._

[Illustration: SO FOR US HE MADE GREAT MEDICINE]

XXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED

I BUILT a fire by the roadside opposite the palatial hotel and made our
coffee. “It’s like lighting a fire and making yourself a personal cup
of coffee on Broadway,” said Lindsay, “but it’s fine.” It’s a dramatic
act and startles the imagination. The coffee-pot could be made the
emblem of revolt--“Go West, young man, with a coffee-pot. You can live
on nothing a year with a coffee-pot. Figure it out, how little money
you need to live in the wilds!”

Vachel is all for giving the business man and clerk and industrial
worker a three-months’ vacation. “They don’t work in these summer
months anyway,” says he. “But they are afraid of being reproached if
they take long holidays. Every man here, be he a millionaire or a poor
man, works. He has an office, he has a factory. If he hasn’t these,
he invents them. He believes it is effeminate to take more than two
weeks’ holiday. For a month’s holiday he must have the recommendation
of his physician. Otherwise he loses caste and may be called a ‘lounge
lizard,’ which is one of the terms of abuse which sting most. On
the other hand, modern work becomes every-day more sedentary, more
mechanical. In accountancy figures become more exclusive, in the
workshop automatic machinery becomes more and more perfect. It dulls
and enthralls the mind.”

“Yet how easy it is to get out and do what we are doing!” I urged in
agreement.

“Go, give them a message,” cried the poet.

“Intelligentsia of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your
chains. Young men and women, get free, get your coffee-pots, take up
the national parks and the free lands of the West!”

“I have an idea that most of the tramps and vagabonds of our
country-sides have had lives full of poetry. The men who are dismissed
as eccentrics were often mystics. America has not liked its Thoreaus
and its Chapmans.... Johnny Appleseed, for instance, who was an
American St. Francis, has been generally laughed at as a sort of a
harmless lunatic.”

We talked of this on the upward trail next day. One point in favour of
the hotel had been its good supply of canvas trousers. I bought myself
a pair, and was thereby saved the reproach of looking a little like
Johnny Appleseed in the matter of my attire. I laughed at Johnny for
having worn a tin can on his head for a hat, and Vachel was at pains to
defend him even there. But the poetry of his life was his going ahead
of the pioneers of Ohio and Indiana, and planting apple-orchards and
tending them and watching them grow for the America that should come
after him. I often wonder whether the large red-gleaming Ohio apples
of to-day do not come from him. I’ve stolen them and munched them
at dawn, as I tramped to the West, and I can testify how good they
were--good medicine.

“And so for us he made great medicine,” says the poet reverently,
quoting his own new poem.

Vachel in his quest for beauty was regarded by many as a crank, an
eccentric. He endured the humiliation of being village-idiot, or, as
they call it in the Middle West, “town-boob.” Awfully silly people who
thought themselves smart would stop in front of him with the air of a
Johnny Walker whisky advertisement and ask him quizzically if he were
“still going strong.” He was discovered later, and hailed and acclaimed
by the poets of America and England, but even then the dulled folk
of business and politics looked doubtfully upon him. He told me, for
instance, how a celebrated impresario introduced him to the notables of
the capital, but always with the formula--

“I want to introduce you to Mr. Vachel Lindsay of Springfield,
Illinois.... He is a pp--oet.”

So there’s a streak of sadness somewhere in the poet’s mind, and it
comes from brother-man. And that sadness has expressed itself in a
love of Johnny Appleseed and all others whom the Spirit drives into the
wilderness.

* * * * *

WE camped then under an overhanging crag of Mt. Justinian and watched
the moon, half eclipsed by a cliff, creep and crawl like a golden
turtle over the mountains, over the mighty tops, over the ... over the
world, whilst bright silver cloudlets in ball-robes danced lightly
amongst the stars. And we climbed next day by twenty-four zigzags to
the jagged summit, and rested in a grand snow-cavern as large as a
church, made by the winds and the drifts in dread mid-winter, and we
saw the clouds blow off the glaciers like washing-day steam out of a
kitchen door. The poet lifted his mighty voice to the rocks, and they
sent a kindred answer back to him. He called the snow-cavern Brand’s
Church, and it was a strange and thrilling place in which to abide.

They call the ridge of the mountain the “Garden Wall,” but it is not
very felicitously named. But it is wall-like. It is like an enormous
exaggeration of the Roman wall built to keep out the Picts and Scots
from England, but it is a rampart against the Martians rather than
against man.

We came at last to a joyous company in an old-fashioned inn, and
made happy acquaintance with a band of hikers and sportsmen and
mountaineers. Girls with riding-switches in their hands were dancing
with one another, and a tall dark striking one whom I called the
Spaniard chummed in with us and brought her friend and made Vachel
promise to recite. We had a mountain-climbers’ supper, and when this
was cleared away the bears came down the mountain toward us for the
leavings, and watched us eagerly and ate the sweets we threw them,
and when the bears were gone we built a huge bonfire and sat around
and watched the sparks fly upward, and told stories and chaffed one
another. And Vachel talked to us all of the virtue of the West and read
to us his poem of the hour--the story of Johnny Appleseed, who in the
days of President Washington made for us all--great medicine.

[Illustration]

_Thackeray advised us--
How to live on nothing a year.
“Take a nice little house in Mayfair;
Order everything and pay nothing.”
We can go one better than that.
Take over the Rocky Mountains
As your personal estate;
Everything arranged for you in advance,
Complete freedom of mind,
And no bills.
When the little game in Mayfair is played out
And you are clearly on the rocks,
Be sweet about it,
Leave your friends a card,
Tell them you’ve been advised a change of scene.
You’re on the Rockies._

[Illustration: HENCEFORTH I CALL YE NOT SERVANTS BUT FRIENDS]

XXIX. LOG-ROLLING

VACHEL slipped near Heaven’s Peak and turned a double somersault
downward, buffeting his head with his huge pack (crammed with canned
goods, loaves, blankets, and what not) and then I picked him up and
found he had sprained his ankle.

“Don’t think I’m hurt,” said the poet. “I yelled because I was scared.
I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”

He didn’t mind the pain, but he loathed being beaten. Nevertheless he
was down and out. “We’ll go on to-morrow,” said he. “We’ll go on next
day.”

“Here we are, and here we remain,” said I, “till the ankle has
recovered. We can stay a week or two weeks, and I’ll go back for more
food. So let’s make up our minds to it.”

So we stayed by a flat-rocked stream on a grand slope in a forest of
stately pines and firs. Vachel sat on his blankets like a sultan. And
he speedily forgot his ankle and the mountains and Heaven’s Peak, and
began to tell me the story of Elbert Hubbard, from the time when he
travelled in Larkin’s soap to the time when he wrote “Who Took the
Lid off Hell?” and went down in the Lusitania. And then he told me
the substance of “A Self-made Businessman’s Letters to his Son,” that
unashamed best seller which portrayed the benevolent soul of a Chicago
packer before Upton Sinclair dared. Then he told me a fantastic story
of how ten ne’er-do-well men of Springfield were found ready to die for
the Flag. Then he told to me from memory Edgar Allan Poe’s story of
King Pest, and the ghouls of the forest crept close to us to listen.
Then he told me of the prairie-schooners which used to have inscribed
on them “Pike’s Peak or bust!”

“Heaven’s Peak or bust,” said I, maliciously pointing to his swollen
ankle. “Lindsay, essaying to climb Heaven’s Peak, slipped downward,” I
went on facetiously, imitating the style of my letters to the _Evening
Post_. He smiled.

“How yer feelin’?” I interjected.

“I’m feelin’ fine,” said he.

“Shall we get to Canada?”

“I’ll be all right to-morrow.”

“We ought to have gone further whilst the goin’ was good, eh?”

“I’m sorry, Stephen,” said he apologetically.

“But this is good?”

“It’s good enough for me.”

“All right.”

* * * * *

BRINGING in wood for a big fire is rather a tedious job, but I hit on
a sporting way of doing it all by myself, and doing it better. We were
at seven thousand feet, and the avalanches and spring floods and storms
had wrought havoc among the trees. Fine dead trunks lay in scores
on the mighty slope of the mountain. Our fire was at the foot of a
slippery granite slide. So I took a stout young pine-tree, and began
to lever the great dead trees and set them rolling downward. Vachel
was perched on a rock above the fire, and the logs arrived at the
embers below like colliding locomotives, with a great bump and showers
of sparks. It was possible to lever and roll downwards logs that were
thirty or forty feet long, and we pulled the great lumps of their
sprawling resinous roots on to the fire.

We slept that night among the granite shelves, and the pine-roots
roared as they burned, and the great rocks beside the fire cracked
under the heat with a sort of earthquake thud which registered a buffet
on our bodies ten yards away.

We stayed four days in this wonderful spot, and I became fascinated
with log-rolling. Even Vachel, with his ankle, hobbled after me and
tried to do it too. We talked of political and literary log-rolling,
log-rolling for one’s friends. “I’m all for it,” said the poet.
“Log-rolling is a virtue.”

Then he recounted to me the origin of the expression--log-rolling. “It
is a Western term,” said the poet. “It also comes from the life of
the pioneers. You know how it was; the settler chose the site of his
log-cabin or of his new barn, and then went into the forest and felled
the number of trees necessary, and he left them lying where they had
fallen, and then called his friends together for a festive occasion.
They all worked together for him, and rolled his logs to the most
convenient spot where they could be piled to make his home. Of course
he always gave his friends a luncheon first, and then they went off and
rolled his logs home for him.”

“And I like that,” said the poet. “No man can hope to do much in this
world without the help of friends. And I for one would not want to.”

Go to it then, ye log-rollers of the literary world, ye friends, we’ll
lunch ye, we’ll give you, coffee with a kick of a mule in it, and fried
corned-beef hash fit for the best friend of the Grand Vizier’s cook.
And he, as you know, fares better than the Sultan himself.

[Illustration]

_Who rolled home Shakespeare’s logs?
We did: we helped to do it.
All the world has given a hand.
Were they lunched first?
Ah, I doubt it.
But that was not Shakespeare’s fault,
He was a jolly fellow!_

_N.B._--According to Frederick Dallenbaugh, writing to the _New
York Post_, the real log-rolling commences after the logs have been
brought to the site:

“The foundation logs for the house having been duly notched and fixed
in position, another tier is placed on top of them, and then another,
and so on till the log wall is of the prescribed height. Now, it is
obvious that it would be difficult to lift the logs up on to this
growing wall. Primitive science then comes to the builder’s aid.
Other logs are placed at an incline against those already established
in their position and the logs that are to surmount the lower logs
are rolled up the incline into place.

“From this came the invitations sent out by the prospective builder
to come to his log-rolling.”

[Illustration: POOR ACTÆON PAYS * THE WOMAN NEVER PAYS]

XXX. TOWARD THE KOOTENAI

SUMMER began to give way to winter on the mountains. There were very
cold nights, and frost. The full moon made the forest spacious, and the
beautiful fir-trees, like candelabras, glittering with silver lights.
The mornings were of an intense stillness as if ordained whilst God
walked in the garden. We had stayed three days beside a grey rock wall
which was eight feet high, and it began to have the light of home upon
it, and one might have lived there long.

Vachel soon began to feel much better, though he looked quaint,
hobbling along the rocks and uneven woodland holding on to a tall
pine-cudgel which he had cut. He wore a red cotton handkerchief over
his crumpled hat, and it was tied in knots under his chin. He was weak
at all joints and walked like a dwarf who lives in a hollow tree, a
fairy-like antediluvian old fellow. His red wind-blown face was lined
and lined. His eyes twinkled as he walked. He stooped to pick up wood,
he looked cautiously about him, and I had the feeling that he would
rapidly scurry away if a human being came into view.

I returned to camp for a bagful of provisions, and bright-faced Myrtle
La Barge gave me a whole apple-pie to take to the poet in memory of
Johnny Appleseed, and she gave me large overweight of cheese and
apricots and ham and all the rest I asked for. That night a bear came
after us, smelling the ham, and I said to him, “Bite Daniel, bite him,
bite him!” and the bear studied us some paltry half-hour, but as the
Comick saith, “his mind was in the kitchen.” And he said to the poet
with a disappointed groan--“How about the ham?” But Vachel then waved
his pine-cudgel and the bear did waver with his hind-quarters and ran
away. The poet then became a silent watcher for the rest of the night.

We set off next day for the Kootenai River, and Vachel had tied up
his game foot in a dozen ropes and bindings, and it was soaking in
iodine besides, and we went very slowly and he sang hymns all the way.
I said to him, “You won’t mind, Vachel, if I go ahead some distance.”
For his singing scared the wild animals. The white-vested woodpecker
walking like a great fly up the dead poles of old pines, tapping as he
went, paused meditatively at the sound of Vachel’s voice; the grouse
and the ptarmigan tripped ahead of us like hens, and scurried out of
view; little piggy the porcupine trembled in all his beautiful quills;
and the squirrels scolded from all the trees as if we were a terrible
annoyance. I am not surprised. At school at Springfield the teacher
used to say; “All sing except Vachel,” the reason being that he has his
own voice entirely. Thus, in slow and devastating accents, keeping pace
with the enforced slow walk and pine-cudgel progress, you might have
heard him singing--

We ... shall ... dwell ... in that fair and happy ... land
Just across ... from the ever-green sho-o-re.

and I put distance between us, but ever as he caught up I could hear
the scared animals rushing away. I grew facetious about the ever-green
shore, after he had sung it fifty-five times, and he, with utter
meekness, gave it up from that hour forth and sang instead:

When he cometh, when he cometh,
To make up his jewels.

* * * * *

WE descended into a profound and shadowy valley where the pines and
firs got loftier as if trying to reach the level of the mighty cliffs
above them, but all their branches hung in veils of the tillandsia
moss. Here were firs with thousands of Uncle Sam beards of yellow-green
hair hanging from thousands of sharp chins. The great depth of the
brown floor of the forest was roofed in by darkness, and tree-tops and
moss. We came down to a wild brawling stream which rent the forest in
twain and let in the fairness of the sky and the sun. It was a perfect
place and I must say we did not expect to meet anybody there.

We took off our clothes in the sun, and naked Lindsay took his shirt
to wash in the stream. Naked, I made a fire by the water-edge, and put
on the coffee-pot to boil. The water of the river was ice-cold, and
surreptitiously dipping a limb in it, one registered the fact. Many
brown comma butterflies danced in the sunshine, and settling on our
arms and legs, tickled us, throwing their honey-tubes deep into our
pores and getting their luncheon before we got ours. Evidently we were
a couple of sweet boys.

Our innocence was, however, sharply disturbed by an unwonted cry and a
shout, and a red-faced, large-eyed, half-breed Indian suddenly appeared
on horseback along the river shore. He was trying to protect the eyes
of his party. But he was too late. We made a rapid scramble and dived
as a party of five highly-amused girls came past, and following them a
dozen pack-mules, carrying their camping outfits and party-frocks.

I lay in the water after that and thought it over whilst a cascade of
melted snow rushed down my neck, and I saw on the shore the coffee-pot
lifting its lid and spitting many times. Presently I saw the Indian
re-appear and struggle through the forest wreckage of the river-bank.

“The party apologises,” says he, “for coming upon you unexpectedly.” I
apologised in return.

[Illustration]

_When Actaeon saw Artemis at her bath,
The goddess changed him to a stag.
And when Tiresias saw Athene thus
She robbed him of his eyes.
But when these goddesses saw Actaeon and Tiresias
A-bathing,
They laughed.
We meant nothing to them
Compared with what they knew they meant to us._

[Illustration: FROM THE FIRE TO THE DARK GOES THE TINY SPARK]

XXXI. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD

WE lunched on ham and peas and caramel cake, and lay in a natural
cradle among the roots of giant firs, and slept for an hour of a
perfect afternoon. After the ice-cold dip and scalding coffee and a
good feed and a self-indulgent snooze, we knew ourselves to be well and
certainly happy. What a thing is physical well-being--to be hard, to
be fit, to be cool, to be clear-headed, to know there’s a live spring
in every muscle, and then to be care-free and able to sleep in the
afternoon!

Vachel’s ankle went very well, the danger was that he might do too much
on it. We walked three or four miles up stream and then camped for the
night on a wild triangle alongside a mighty barricade of the jetsam of
broken water-washed tree trunks, some as long as fifty feet. We lodged
in the profound trough of a characteristic Western canyon. Night came
quickly, and our camp-fire light obscured the stars. The giant trees
with shadowy bases climbed sheer out of sight into the murky sky above.
The brown and white foaming river, like hundreds of swimming beavers,
rolled onward past us all the while. We boiled from it, washed clothes
in it, made soap-foam over it, but the ever-freshening waves purified
our margins faster than we could sully them. We paddled about in bare
feet on the shore and gathered wood whilst the firelight played on the
stones, and we heaped high the bonfire. I stood on a mighty chief of
the forest and flung lesser logs from the water-washed wood barricade
right to the fire, and they landed one after another with a thud and a
roar in the midst of the flames. Then we lay flat on our backs on our
blankets and watched our sparks fly up and die in scores, in thirties,
in fives, in thirty-fives, in hundred and fives. What a giddy and wild
life some of them had! How they whirled! How impetuous were some, how
serpentine others! We saw how all of them trailed their light as the
first escaped from the fire, and were like serpents of flame.

“They do not die,” said the poet. “They only seem to die; they go
on, like ideas, into the invisible world. I’d like to write a volume
of adventures, the story of the adventures of, say, twelve different
sparks.”

It was very white wood and very red fire. And it was slow-burning, for
the resin had been washed out of all their boles. The fire glowed and
glittered and was sociable and was taking time to live and taking time
to die. Our eyes grew hot and staring, like children’s eyes sitting
in front of the yule-logs listening to Christmas tales after their
bed-time hour.

Our thoughts fly up brightly and then disappear, but goodness knows
where they go to. Our fancies stream upward idly like little flaming
serpents. Life is a fire, and we keep on burning and throwing up
sparks. We are very pretty, if we could only see ourselves, with our
thoughts and fancies jumping out of us and flying from us. The fire
will burn out towards dawn, and then the sparks will cease. They’ll
only be a happy memory then. But the poet believes the sparks go on.

What a silence! The river is roaring past like the river of time
itself, but we have forgotten it, we have detached ourselves from
it, and beside our little fire there is a silence all our own. We
have a silence and a noise at the same time. There is a stillness and
aloofness and a sense of no man near.

A disturbing thought comes. “If there were an earthquake in San
Francisco you’d feel the tremor here. If there were an earthquake in
the West the river might suddenly flow over us.” We listened, we tried
to sense the sleeping world, the ball on which we were lying. How
still, how peaceful it was! Not a tremor, not a quiver from beneath us!
Old earth slept the perfect sleep of a child. We too could sleep that
way, and presently some one spoke but the others did not reply, did not
dare. One was left speaking and the other was asleep. All became still
and quiet in the temple. The candles were still burning. But the priest
had gone. It was night, and the Spirit reigned in serenity. And the
candles were still burning.

[Illustration]

_A tiny spark was born to-day;
It said good-b’ye to yesterday.
It carried up a tiny light,
Said good-day and then good-night.
“Good-morrow!” said the tiny spark,
But ere the morrow came ’twas dark.
So that’s the best that he can do,
In his own time say “How d’ye do.”_

[Illustration: LINCOLN
THE STAR OF THE EAST BECOMES THE STAR OF THE WEST]

XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD

NEXT day, tramping to Flat Top Mountain, we talked of Springfield and
Abraham Lincoln. We were in stately forests, and the ancient mould
under the feet silenced our steps. We walked slowly, and stopped to
pick the big black huckleberries, paused to climb over stricken trees,
paused to eat the raspberries from the undergrowth of raspberry bushes.

“I’d like you to think of Lincoln as a poor man,” said Vachel,
“an eccentric--laughed at, sneered at a great deal, entirely
underestimated, a man who was a mystic, who believed in dreams and
presentiments and told many dreams to his Cabinet with great gravity.
Politicians want to see in him a conventional great man now, but in his
life-time he was called eccentric. He was as much laughed at as Johnny
Appleseed. But if a man is called eccentric in this country, or much
laughed at, you’ll often find he was a mystic or a genius of some kind.”

One of Vachel’s alternative ideas for a tramp was to do a Springfield
star, making the city our centre to radiate outward, or, could I say,
walk radiantly outward, in one direction, then in another, all round
the compass. “As you went to Bethlehem with the Russian pilgrims so you
could pilgrimage to our Bethlehem,” said he, “see our star.”

People from all parts of the world come to Springfield to see the
Lincoln home, to visit Salem and the grave of Anne Rutledge, to salute
Lincoln’s grave. They do so, not because they are told to do so, or
because there are organised tours, but because the heart moves them to
it.

But there are also many people in America ready to turn their backs on
the simple Abe Lincoln of Springfield. He is too rough for them, too
untidy, too raw. They would fain think of him as a man of aplomb, a man
of a well-established family, one of the governing class. Lincoln’s
son Robert is president of the Pullman Car Company, and they would see
the father in the son and surmise a family well-lined, well-wadded,
well-upholstered. In that class you can get to power, and be carried
there, and sleep on the way. Belong to that class and all is yours!

But the real Abe Lincoln gives the lie to this. It offends some people
to the heart to think that Lincoln’s father lived in a three-ways-round
log-cabin with the fourth side not built in, that young Abraham was a
barge-man, what we call in England a bargee, and came down the Sangamon
River in a flat-bottomed boat with a cargo and got stuck on the dam
at Salem and accepted a job there, and slept in a sort of loft over a
ramshackle tavern, men one side of a plank, women the other, and that
he rose out of the very depths of American life.

“What Lincoln did, any boy in the United States can aspire to do,”
cried Vachel as we sat on a log together and looked at the shadow and
shine of the myriad-fold population of trees. “We’ve no governing
class. We’ve only got a class that thinks it is the governing class,
but it is the most barren in the community. Lincoln’s life shows
the real truth. Any one who feels he has it in him can rise to the
Presidency of the United States.”

I promised to make the pilgrimage to the Lincoln shrines when our tramp
should be over and we returned to Springfield. Then Vachel was fired
by his pet fancies about his native city. He would have it all painted
white, like the Chicago World’s Fair. “White harmonises all sizes and
shapes of houses and all types of architectural design. And it has an
effect on the mind. It suggests the ideal. If the city were all painted
white, then people would try to live up to its appearance. Then also
it would stand out among all cities of America. The very fact of its
painting itself white would go into every newspaper in the United
States, it would be known in all English-speaking lands and would
direct world-attention to the shrine of Abraham Lincoln,” said he.

It seemed to me a practical idea, and I bade him preach it still. He’d
find valuable allies in the paint merchants and painters of Springfield
anyway. If America could go “dry” one need not despair of Springfield
painting itself white. “In America all things are possible,” as a
German street-song says.

He returned once more to his story of the ten who died for the flag
of Springfield--the new flag of the city. “I’ve always felt,” said
he, “that there could be found at least ten men among the unlikely
fellows who loaf around our town square ready to give their lives for
Springfield. If ever there came a time when Springfield was in danger
or its flag likely to be dishonoured, I know it is from the tramps and
wasters that something would come. At least, from the people we don’t
know.”

“If only I could write that idea as Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘King Pest,’”
said the poet, “then I’d tell the truth and shame the Devil.”

* * * * *

“YET Springfield was once disgraced by a most unholy race-riot,” my
companion went on. “It was in 1908, the centenary of Lincoln’s birth,
and I felt it as a terrible disgrace. The negro victims were entirely
innocent. It was a shocking affair.”

We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys
and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the
forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the
eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. We saw
in retrospect many of the mountains we had climbed. “Going-to-the-Sun”
and “Heaven’s Peak” were remote but grandiose on the horizon. We were
on a much-exposed ridge of Flat Top Mountain, and we camped in a wintry
spot beside a natural table of rock. On the rock we spread our supper;
on the ground our blankets. The wind blew the flaps of our blankets,
it blew away the flaming embers of the bonfire which we made, and it
ignited the grass, and when we had put the fire out on one side it
broke out on the other, and yet there was not enough of a fire to warm
us. Night came on, and we sought new fuel. Vachel hobbled beside me and
discoursed in a preoccupied way about Springfield and its race-riot.

“I’m with you all the way about the Negroes, Stephen,” said he, as we
struggled to upraise an embedded sapling which the snows had tumbled
over in the spring. “If you write about the Negro again, say I’m with
you, I subscribe to it. I’ll go the limit with you.”

We raised the entangled, difficult, fallen tree up on to the star-radii
of its roots, and looked down the wild slope to where our fire was
burning and blowing. It was dark up there where we were, and the fire
below gleamed in the darkness. We rolled the sapling down to the
fire and on to it, and stamped out the flames in the grass, and then
returned into the darkness for another sapling.

“You know how I felt in Springfield when that riot occurred,” said
Vachel. “I visited all the leading Negroes and most of the leading
white men. I bombarded the newspapers with letters. And I don’t know
that it did any good. You couldn’t be sure that another onslaught on
the coloured people wouldn’t occur to-morrow.”

As we talked we sought and collected withered branches, wind-riven arms
of the pines. Some we had to pull out of the earth, others we could not
pull out.

“I believe the only way to stop lynching would be to break into a
lynching crowd and make them either lynch you instead of the Negro or
lynch you for interfering. When they realised what they had done their
hearts would be touched, their consciences would be shocked,” said
Vachel.

We had unwieldy faggots in our arms and so walked closely together down
the hill, supporting one another’s wood.

“It is expedient that one man should die for the people once more,”
said the poet.

We made up a good fire; we boiled a pot of coffee and fried a heap of
beans and stewed a cup of apricots and cut the bread and untied the
sugar-bag and exposed the dried raisins, of which we had a capacious
little sack-full and wrapped ourselves round and sat by the fire and
fed and talked--

“Springfield was just about to attract the attention of the world in a
special way, as the shrine of Lincoln, when that riot broke out,” said
Vachel. “Large schemes had been approved for the improvement of the
city. All promised well. Then suddenly this race-riot broke out, and
Springfield was the subject of cartoons all over the United States.
The finger of scorn was pointed at Lincoln’s city. Springfield is still
trying to live it down.”

I confessed it was difficult to think of Springfield as an American
Bethlehem after it had been the scene of a race-riot. That was indeed
a smudge on its fair name. Quiet little Bethlehem in Palestine has at
least kept clear of that. Still even Bethlehem could not help it if
some ugly human doings occurred there.

It was curious that the race-riot sprang from the “poor Whites,” and
yet from the same poor Whites Vachel was ready to find ten who would
die for the Flag.

I told my thought then, and that was, that the poor white population,
heroic as it was, would not be deterred by the self-sacrifice of one
of their number for the sake of the Blacks. This very year an English
clergyman was stripped and beaten almost to death by a gang of Whites
in Florida, just because he asked a congregation for fair play for the
Negro. And nothing happened to the gang. No prosecutions followed.
Lynch is powerful when law is weak.

“The social conscience is dull,” said the poet sadly. “The Negro
question is the one which has most plagued America, and most people
have given it up and decided not to fret their brains any more about
it. You see, we even fought a war for it once, and we’re always
quarrelling about it. A news paragraph about a man being burned by a
mob will not even catch the notice of the newspaper reader. It either
does not stir his imagination, or he refuses to think about it.”

“But it brings America into disrespect in Europe. It takes away from
the force of her moral example,” said I.

Lindsay knew that. We discussed then the daring appeal of Governor
Dorsey of Georgia to the people of that State to mend their ways. We
discussed South Africa and then India.

And then we went for more wood, and the stars shone out above us,
peerless in their righteousness, rolling along deliberately as ever on
their fixed ways. “How brightly they shine on us,” said I. “We should
be as they. If they erred and strayed from their ways as we do, what a
mad universe ’twould be.”

“And one of them,” said the poet, “is the star of Bethlehem, the star
that rested over Bethlehem and then rested over Springfield for a
while.”

“Up here in the mountains we see the stars, but down there in the
forests and dark valleys it is not so easy,” said I.

We talked of Springfield by the firelight till one of us fell asleep.
One picture remains in my mind, and that is of a Hindu who sought out
Vachel Lindsay after he had been to Abraham Lincoln’s home. “Show me
now the home of the poet who lives among you,” said the Hindu.

[Illustration]

_A Hindu came to Springfield,
He saw the home of Lincoln,
He saw the court of Lincoln,
He saw the streets he trod.
“Now show me,” quoth the Hindu,
Show me your poet Lindsay,
Show me your prophet Lindsay,
Who sings to-day to God._

_The guide to Fifth Street therefore led
And showed the house where Lindsay fed.
And the Hindu much rejoiced and said:
“I know that Springfield is not dead.”_

[Illustration: GOOD-DAY MR PRESIDENT]

XXXIII. FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN

THE fire burned sulkily at dawn, and the grass around it was white
with frost. We had lain awake for an hour, silently meditating on the
joys of coffee to be. We knew it was no use getting up before sunrise,
for fuel was scarce and hard to find. It was a wonderful dreamy dawn,
rising above the mists of an autumnal night. We looked to see antelopes
perched on the crags above us, and mountain-goats. But the scene was
bare on all hands. Our eyes lighted on the rusty foliage of some
uprooted trees. Walking in our unlaced boots, we brought this dead wood
in, made a fine blaze, and had breakfast, and then curled ourselves up
by the fire and slept till the sun stood higher. If I woke first it was
to sit with a blanket about my shoulders and pen an article for Kit
Morley. It commonly happened that I sat by the fire and scribbled my
letters to the Post in the morning whilst the poet had an extra hour
asleep.

When we resumed our climb the poet got talking of the Indians.
Curiously enough Flat Top Mountain marks the entrance to the country of
the Flat-Heads, the Flat-Heads being so called because they press their
babies’ heads to obtain a flat-headed type of beauty. The mountain has
imitated the Indians and grown up flat-headed too. We were presently
to meet, when we crossed the Canadian line, a considerable number
of Indians of various tribes. Vachel facetiously observed that he
wouldn’t mind taking an Indian bride if he could find one that walked
thirty-five miles a day and took a bath every morning. I held that
it was very snobbish on his part. The disqualifying point, however,
proved to be the chewing of tobacco. When the poet saw these young
Amazons rolling their quids he was confirmed in bachelordom.

“Great people, the Indians,” said Vachel. “I was brought up on their
orations. So was mother, I believe. Did you ever see M’Gaffey’s reader
with Black Hawk’s ‘Oration’ and the ‘Defence of Spartacus,’ and other
wonderful studies in popular oratory? I wouldn’t mind voting for an
Indian to be President of the United States.”

“What! A red Indian? I should have thought America was too prejudiced
against colour.”

“Not against the Indians. Against the Negroes. You and I don’t think a
Negro could rise to Presidency. But an Indian is different. There is a
great romance connected with the Indians; there are the traditions of
the battles with them; there is the personal grandeur of the braves.
Every American boy has longed to be an Indian chief. And then there is
the strain of Pocahontas, the Indian princess, married into the pride
of Virginia. I believe an Indian President is just what we want to
root us in America and give us a genuine American inspiration. It would
bring poetry into politics. It would bring all the glamour of the West.”

“But it is not a practical possibility,” I urged.

“I believe it could be put over,” said the poet. “You see, the Indians
are a hunting people, a sporting people. They’ve refused to bow the
knee to the sordid side of life.”

We agreed that they were such good hunters that it was in vain the
United States Government protected game in these parts. The Flat-Heads
seemed to have swept off everything. You may go for days and see
nothing more edible than marmots and porcupines. On the other hand, I
have heard it said that the animals know the difference between the
reservations of the Indians and the preserved regions of the Rockies,
and at sight of an Indian on the horizon they rush to safety.

Lindsay recounted to me the story of the political campaigns of
“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” and how the wild tokens of Western life
invaded the East and moved the imagination of America. Every American
politician is aware of this motive force. Even Roosevelt, a pure New
Yorker, played the Western game--as Colonel of the Rough Riders.

We had a wonderful walk along the Flat Top, which was a prolonged
mountain meadow full of flowers. Vachel began to repine because he
foresaw that, like everything else, our tramp must end, and that in
a few weeks we should be back in Springfield and the mere town. I
told him a story of how one summer day in Petrograd I paused at a
fruiterer’s shop to buy some strawberries which looked very inviting.
They were very dear, but the shopkeeper said, “I have some very
good second quality strawberries inside the shop, and I strongly
recommend them.” “Thanks,” said I. “But I never buy second quality
strawberries.” “So in life, eh Vachel, let us never accept second
quality strawberries.”

The poet laughed, and began talking of grades of eggs, new-laid eggs,
State eggs, selected eggs, political eggs. So walking gently we reached
the north-western extremity of the tableland and came upon a grandiose
diversified scene of shadows and gloomy greens and barren scarps, and
of crowned monarchs of ice and snow. The pines of the Canadian approach
were posted like companies of soldiers and disposed in beleaguering
armies as if the line, unguarded by men, was guarded by trees, the
forest wardens of the Empire and the Republic. The poet saw in the
scene another Turner engraving.

We plunged then downward through thick masses of alder and hazel, a
whole mountain-side solid with low growth. Here also were thousands of
raspberry bushes all agleam with rosy fruits. Vachel called the descent
a “raspberry epic.” Down, down we plunged to the dark valley of the
rushing Kootenai, only finding a camping-ground after dark.

We came to an aged river in a steep vale of years with old shaggy
firs on its very water-edge, and with the ruins of the uncontrollable
ever-encroaching forest piled up like walls. We lighted a fire on a
humpy-bumpy bit of shore where it was hard either to walk or sit, but
easy to find wood to burn. We each cleared ourselves a cradle in the
brown needles of the infringing firs.

It was a magnificent enclosure which the old river was a-running
through, like a cypress-walled garden of an Asiatic mountain-castle.
The trees stood like gigantic janissaries or guardsmen with their
cloaks on. The night-stars were exalted by the climbing forest and
peeped but faintly into the depths, and like a mighty black bastion the
sheer rock of the mountain cut off the view northward.

The fire flared, the hot stones cracked and burst. We put our hot
blankets around us and sprawled on them whilst the poet cooked the ham
and the beans, and I tended the coffee-pot or stripped the last wisps
of grease-paper from the butter.

We slept in our cradles and wakened in the morning to see the beavers
jumping among the fallen timber and diving in the river.

[Illustration]

_A prairie resident,
A dweller in a tent,
A White House resident,
A good man for President!
To White House from white tent.
O excellent precedent!
A precedent for a President.
An unprecedented President!_

[Illustration: We’ve seen your line of difference and viewed it with
indifference.]

XXXIV. CROSSING THE CANADIAN LINE

“AS we approach the British Empire,” says Vachel facetiously, “the
huckleberries grow more plentiful, the raspberry bushes larger, the
trees loftier, the air purer.” In the poet’s mind politics and hymns
gave way to desire of huckleberries. I luxuriated in raspberries. He
was Huckleberry Finn. I was a character in Russian folk-lore--the hare
with the raspberry-coloured whiskers. “When we get to a Canadian hotel
let us register as H. Finn and R. C. W. Hare,” said the poet.

We had slept on the hoar-frosted grass of mountain meadows near the
sky; we had slept among the beavers on the banks of the Kootenai; we
tramped in the radiant upper air; we tramped in the gloom of ancient
forests. Mount Cleveland lifted its dome of snow high o’er the lesser
mountains. Trapper Mountain receded. We listened one night to the
coyotes caterwauling in their loneliness. Their superfluous lugubrious
laments reminded me of modern West of Ireland poetry. Vachel laughed
at the comparison. We came to a deserted cabin, once the habitation of
a ranger, now littered with Alberta whisky bottles, and here we read
a pencilled remark written years ago: “Slept here last night. Visited
by a bare who came into cabin and et two sides of bacon.” Another
pencilled notice, apparently by the same hand, said: “Don’t leave
garbig lying about but put it in the Garbig Holl.” An Indian came and
offered to lead us to a boat on Lake Waterton and give us a ferry to
Canada. We preferred to walk, but it occurred to me afterwards that he
was not so much interested in boating as in bottles. I don’t doubt he
could have got us a drink. Then a grand mounted party came past us
with guides and pack-horses, coming from over Brown Pass, going over
Indian Pass. This was a rich American family on holiday: here were
father and mother, grown children, young children, cousins, and in
the midst of them Aunt Jemima, looking very proud and stiff, with an
expression on her face which signified “_Never again!_” They had been
twenty-eight days in the mountains, camping out all the time.

* * * * *

VACHEL’S ankle was rather weak, and he much preferred sitting to
walking. He called himself “the slow train through Arkansas.” We
stopped at stations, half-stations, and halts. “All I lack, Stephen, is
steam,” said he. But every now and then he would take courage and say,
“Lots of walk in me to-day--Canada to-night!”

The excitement of finding the “Canadian Line” cheered my companion. The
face which in the morning had looked contrite and penitent as that of
one just released from jail, lighted up with new mirth and facetious
intent. He began to get steam. The slow train from Arkansas began to
approach Kentucky, and the sign of steam was a return to political
conversation. He began to chaff me mercilessly on the subject of the
Empire and King George and the British lion. I chaffed him about “God’s
own country.” The poet identified America with all that was best in
America’s traditions and in the visions of her poets, the

All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,

of his native country. I was critical, for I bore in my mind the
growth of materialism, the corruption of the law, the lynchings of
the Negroes, and the rest. He wanted me to dissociate America from
the dollar, from the noisy business rampage, and from all that was
unworthy, and instead identify America with the dreams of her idealists.

“That is what I did with Russia,” said I. “If I tell England of the
ideal America they’ll only call me a mystic. But you, Vachel,” I
continued, “try and think of the Empire that way.”

He found it difficult. He could think creatively about his own country,
but where others were concerned he reverted to the normal critical
mind.

* * * * *

IT is almost a recognised convention in literature. If you are writing
about a foreign country you take the general average of what you
observe and describe that. You can attack lustily without fear that the
magazine will lose “advertising.” The writer on Russia was supposed to
bring home a report that the police, and indeed every one else, took
bribes, the Jews were persecuted, the prisoners in Siberia were chained
together. Most American writers on Russia have done it. Kennan is a
characteristic case, who obtained fame identifying Russia with prison
horrors without recalling to the minds of his readers that there are
dreadful prisons also in the United States, and that the silence of his
own Georgia is sometimes desecrated by the melancholy clank-clank of
the chain-gang.

I was besought in 1917, by a leading magazine of America, to write an
account of Rasputin, and although I had many interesting stories of
that evil genius of Russia I refused to write what I considered would
at that time be damaging to Russia. On the other hand, I wrote in 1919
a realistic vision of America in perhaps her saddest post-war moment,
when Wilson was down and no one knew what America was going to do next,
and offered it to the same journal. But the editor was quite hurt that
I did not then see America in roseate hues. How characteristic of this
sprightly world, which, as Latimer said, “was begotten of Envy and put
out at Discord for nurse!”

Not that the poet was critical of England. He idealised England.
He was not as critical of England as I was of America. Whilst he
idealised America creatively he idealised England romantically. To him
America was something to be; to him England was something that forever
was--beautiful, the substance of poetry, the evidence of things not
seen. He did not sympathise with the Irish. He did not think England
was so well organised, commercially, as America. But then to him that
was a point in our favour. Only one point was registered against us--he
did not think that as a nation we could make coffee; and we lagged
behind on Prohibition. But then he had to admit that the Americans for
their part did not know how to make tea.

“Except for the King,” said Vachel, “we are much the same people.”
He loathed kings. “There’s not much difference between Canada and the
United States,” he went on.

“We’ll see,” I answered. “Canadians are subjects of a monarch;
Americans are citizens of a Republic. Canadians look to the King. More
than a mere line divides the two halves of North America. You’ll see.”

So we tramped on. We had a last lunch and finished the ham, the
apricots, and the coffee. As one remarkable fact, we met no Canadians
on the American side; we met no Americans going to Canada either. Yet
there were no restrictions whatever. Out in the Rockies the unguarded
line is literally unguarded; no patrols, no excise or passport
officers. You can come and go as you please. The United States would
encourage Canada to a communion of perfect freedom. Whilst America puts
nothing in Canada’s way, Canada for her part could not afford to police
a 4000-mile line. All is therefore free.

Still, it is clearly the wild animals that take advantage of freedom,
and they abound and are happy in the region about the line. It is a
very strange line, straight and absolute on the map, the essence of
political division, an absurdity in geography. There is no river, no
main mountain-range, no change of the colour of the soil, but only the
invisible hypothesis called 54.40--the “Fifty-four Forty or fight” of
the boundary dispute. It would have been difficult to find the line but
for the fact that a sixteen-foot swathe has been cut in the forest. We
had been told to look out for that. We found it at last, and it was
afternoon, and we stood in No-man’s land together.

It was a curious cut, a rough glade, an alley through the tall pines.
We walked along it a short way; we discerned where it stretched far
over a mountain-side, a mere marking in the uniform green of the
forest-roof. We came down to where the lake water was lapping on the
shore, and the great mountains in their fastnesses stood about us. We
found frontier-post No. 276, and then I stood on the Canada side and
Vachel Lindsay stood on the America side, and we put our wrists on
the top of the post. As we two had become friends and learned to live
together without quarrelling, so might our nations! It was a happy
moment in our tramping.

Then, as it was four in the afternoon, I proposed having tea, much to
the mirth of the poet. For had we not finished the last of our coffee
at our last American resting-place? Fittingly we began on tea when we
entered the Empire.

There was a change of scenery; fresher air, aspen groves, red hips on
many briars. A beautiful mountain lifted its citadelled peak into a
grey unearthly radiance. We climbed Mount Bertha, and the hillsides
were massed with young slender pines that never grow hoary or old, but
die whilst they are young, and are supplanted by the ever-new--forests
of everlasting youth. The grandeur of the mountains increased upon us
till all was in the sublimity of the Book of Job and of the Chaldean
stars. There was nothing petty anywhere--but an eternal witness and an
eternal silence.

[Illustration]

_A Yank and a Britisher walked to the line,
One was a citizen, the other an alien.
“You alien!” said the Yank._

_The Yank and the Britisher crossed o’er the line,
One was a subject, the other an alien.
“You alien!” said the Britisher._

_But when Yank and Briton elapsed hands on the line,
Then neither the Yank nor the Briton was alien._

_Hail, Uncle Sam!
Hail, John Bull!_

_We’ve found your line of difference
And viewed it with indifference._

_You don’t need to guard it,
Nor yet to regard it
With doubt or with fret.
Six weeks we’ve tramped together
In every sort of weather,
And haven’t quarrelled yet._

_We toe the line, we toe it,
The old tramp and the poet.
If we can do it.
And not rue it,
All can--says the poet._

[Illustration: WASHINGTONIA WELLINGTONIA HINDENBURGER]

XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE

SO we entered the Dominion National Park of Waterton Lakes. We climbed
the next mountain after Mount Bertha and saw on every hand the
pinnacled and pillared tops of the Canadian mountains, crags surmounted
by mighty teeth of stone blackly silhouetted against a radiant sky.
Some Dominion officials came into these parts last year, cancelled the
old names of the mountains, and gave them a new set--Mount Joffre,
Mount Foch, and the rest, as if they were No. 1 and No. 2 of Great War
villas. I see by old maps that Mount Cleveland used to be called Kaiser
Peak. How war changes the names of places! It changed St. Petersburg to
Petrograd, Pressburg to Bratislavl; it has even changed the names of
the Rocky Mountains.

“Luckily the Germans did not win,” I said to Vachel, “or New York might
have become ‘Zeppelindorf.’”

We were walking down a slope which Nature had planted out with pompous
trees called “Wellingtonias.”

“What do you call them?” asked the poet.

“Wellingtonias.”

“Not in America. We call them ‘Washingtonias.’”

“You forget you’ve crossed the line--Washingtonias this morning, but
Wellingtonias this afternoon.”

The poet submitted.

“But what would the Germans have called them?”

“Perhaps they’d call them ‘Bluchers’ or ‘Hindenburgers.’”

Apropos of Bluchers--in the first Canadian village we visited the
cobbler for repairs. He was an old man, and explained to us just
exactly what “Blucher shoes” were. He pronounced the name to rhyme with
“butcher,” and he called them shoes in the American fashion. In America
boots are shoes, and shoes are boots.

“They call them Bluchers,” said the cobbler in a quavering voice,
“because Blucher came up on both sides, and Bony did not know on which
side he’d turn up. So the upper of the Bluchers are equally high on
both sides of the shoe.”

* * * * *

THAT is, however, to go some days ahead. We are in the Rockies still,
and beside a wonderful stretch of water blown by mountain winds into
myriads of running waves. We bathed on its shallow shores; we did not
venture far from the bank. For Waterton is a mysterious lake. It has
often been sounded, but there are parts of it where no bottom has been
found. It is the hole out of which these Rocky Mountains have been
scooped, and it goes down, down, down, to the very depths of the earth.

At last we came to a Canadian camping-ground and a group of people
clustered around a Ford touring car. A Ford car used for touring.
Here there happened to be on holiday a professor of English, and he
recognised Lindsay at first sight--such is the fame of the poet in
American universities and schools.

This camping-group told us we were in a land predominantly inhabited
by Mennonites, Mormons, and Dukhobors, and they whetted our curiosity
considerably regarding our new neighbours. We had arrived in a part of
Canada which was rather obscure and certainly little visited by either
Americans or Englishmen.

We came to a ramshackle inn and a village and a dance-hall, and it was
the last dance of the season. The Mormon, German, and Russian belles
checked in their corsets at the cloakroom, and prepared for fun. It
was a log-cabin hall, but the floor was waxed, and from the beams hung
coloured-paper lanterns. There were a score or so of black bear-skins
hung on the walls all the way round. On the bear-skins were white
sashes with these words printed on them: _I DO LOVE TO CUDDLE_; and on
the main beam of the ceiling was written: _Patrons are respectfully
requested to park their gum outside_. The whole front of the piano was
taken out so that there should be more noise. Splotches on the floor
showed how in the past, patrons had surreptitiously brought in their
gum and had accidents. Many couples assembled, and we saw the human
species, though not at its best.

* * * * *

WE issued from the mountains on to the southern Alberta plain, and then
looking back, saw every great mountain we had ever crossed. “We’ve
found the real sky-scrapers,” said Vachel. “Instead of the Times
Building, Heaven’s Peak; instead of the Flatiron, Flat Top Mountain;
instead of the World Building, Going-to-the-Sun; and instead of the
building raised by dimes, the temple not made by hands. The way to
these wonders is not by Broadway, but by primitive trails.” The poet
conducted the orchestra of the universe with the long blossoming stem
of a basket-flower--“instead of the Stock Exchange, the Star Granary
over Waterton Lake,” he murmured. We named the beautiful grouping of
mountains about the lake as the Star Granary. For at night, with stars
above and star-reflections below, it was as if the barns were full of
Heaven’s harvest.

We tramped away northward toward the Crow’s Nest, where a great forest
fire was raging, and we came to the “cow-town” of Pincer Creek.
The Canadian Wild West seemed much wilder than the Wild West south
of the line--or rather, the population seemed wilder. One missed
the gentleness and playfulness of the United States. The men were
harder than down south, and they looked at us with a contempt only
modified by the thought that we might be potential harvest hands. The
Canadian-English looked more askance at Vachel than they did at me.
He looked poetical. They couldn’t have put a name to it, but that is
what it was. But whatever it was, I could feel their aversion. They
disapproved of tramps, but preferred them to poets. I could see also
they didn’t care for Vachel’s accent, but they rejoiced in mine and
spoke to me just to get me to reply so that they could hear once more
the voice of the Old Country. We were clearly in the Empire and not in
the Republic. The Union Jacks in the little log-cabins were wreathed
with flowers. The Stars and Stripes had disappeared. We were so struck
with the change of feeling in the air that we bought ourselves a
school-history of Canada and read it assiduously. The very way of man
looking to man was different. Then the first popular song which sounded
in our ears was:

We never get up until the sergeant
Brings our breakfast up to bed.
O it’s a lovely war!

which is a purely British army song. The Englishman in Alberta is an
overman in the midst of a miscellaneous foreign under-population. The
Englishman’s word is law. He is stronger, rougher in his language and
his ways--not educated. But this sort of fibre is best suited for the
outposts of Empire.

“We Americans are just a bunch of playful kittens,” said Vachel.

There was nothing very playful about the Alberta pioneers.

“Did you light that fire on the side of the road a mile back? Well, you
dam well go back and put it out.”

“We did put it out.”

“I tell ye, ye didn’t. I won’t waste my breath talking to you. If you
set the prairie afire I’ll have you both in jail by sundown.”

“All right, we’ll go back.”

[Illustration]

_We’re on the same continent.
Well, I don’t know. Smells different somehow.
Same air; people speak the same language.
But I don’t see that bird about,
That old eagle of yours.
Smells as if a lion had been here.
You don’t know the lion’s smell?
Well, smell that Union Jack!
That’s it._

[Illustration: BURN YOUR RIFLES AND RETURN TO WORK]

XXXVI. DUKHOBORS

WE had not anticipated coming into the neighbourhood of the Dukhobors.
It was an interesting surprise. I had promised myself I would make a
special pilgrimage some day to Western Canada just to find out what the
Dukhobors thought about life, and how they were getting on now. And
then to come on them accidentally.

The Dukhobors, or “Spirit wrestlers,” are a Russian religious community
brought to Canada in 1898. They claim to have been in existence in
Russia for over three hundred years. They are primitive Christians akin
to Quakers, but more uncompromising. They are Communists, pacifists,
anti-state, anti-church, anti-law. Theologically they consider Christ
as a good man and teacher, but not divine. Tolstoy’s teachings show
him very close to the Dukhobors in theory. He greatly sympathised with
them in the persecution which they suffered at the hands of the Russian
Government, and it was in part due to him, and more largely to the
Society of Friends in England, that the expatriation of the Dukhobors
was accomplished. Tolstoy is said to have put aside the profits of his
novel _Resurrection_ to defray in part the expenses of transporting the
Russians. There are several thousand of them, and first they were taken
to Cyprus where at least the British Navy got acquainted with them, as
they were naturally a curiosity. Cyprus was not suitable, and so Canada
was chosen for a habitat. The community was taken to Saskatchewan, and
later migrated in large part to British Columbia. They did not find
their path strewn with roses in Canada, and have had a hard time.
But despite persecution they have prospered. They are notorious for a
naked procession they once made “in quest of the Messiah” some forty
miles in bitter winter weather, displaying “the naked truth” to the
Canadians--the pilgrimage to Yorktown which has been described with
much gusto in the American and Canadian Press. They have refused to
take steps to relinquish their Russian nationality, refused to fight,
refused to pay taxes. So naturally they have been a thorn in the side
of the Canadian.

The Rocky Mountains stretching away in their majesty must remind
some Russians of the grand array of the Caucasus as seen from the
north--and the prairie is the steppe. Far away you discern the white
and brown buildings of a settlement, and then, ten times as large as
anything else, pale-blue grain-elevators. The circumambient moor is
many coloured, and a dove-coloured sky is flecked with softest cloud.
There are snow fences at many points of the road to protect from drifts
in winter. A neverceasing wind which brings no rain is driving over
the corn-fields. As you approach the village you begin to see Russian
peasant men and women working on the fields hoisting the wheat-sheaves
to the harvesting carts, hoisting the sheaves to the top of the
stacks. A stalwart peasant-wife in cottons stands on top of the stack,
pitchfork in her hand, and she catches the sheaves as they come up to
her. The grain-elevators rise mightily into vision, and then the words
printed on them in large black letters--=THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF
UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD=.

I soon met Pavel Potapof, the local headman, and I talked in Russian
with a number of men and women who spoke no other language. They were
raising wheat for themselves and for their wheatless brethren who live
in the lumbering camps and villages of British Columbia, but represent
a sort of a half-way colony between the original Verigin, Saskatchewan,
and the main settlement of Brilliant, British Columbia.

Potapof was a boy at Cyprus, where his father enjoyed some authority.
He is now a man in his thirties with brown moustache and close-clipped
chin. If you are a Dukhobor you may not shave but you may clip with the
shears. He remembered touching a Mr. St. John at Cyprus, who used to
call him Pavlushka.

Potapof spoke Russian with a soft Little-Russian accent, all g’s being
h’s. He came from Tiflis province, and I talked first of the Caucasus,
comparing them with the Rockies. Then naturally we discussed Russia,
and a curious crowd gathered about us. Scarcely any spoke English--all
were Russian subjects, and I much wondered what they thought of the
Bolshevik revolution. For they also are Communists. I soon learned that
an appeal had been made to them on behalf of the Bolsheviks to help
to stem the famine in Russia. Some of the Dukhobors were for sending
grain, some not. They blamed the Bolsheviks for their “two million men
under arms.”

Most of them said: “Let those who are richer in Russia give to
those who are poorer; there’ll be enough to go round.” Imagination
did not show them the ghastly ruin of contemporary Russia, where,
except for a handful of Soviet commissaries, there are no rich, no
“better-off” people. Most of them also said: “Let them lay down their
arms, and then we’ll think of feeding them.” But their deliberations
crystallised in the following way. They decided on a symbolic act.
They visited all their Ruthenian and Galician neighbours and any
one who had a war-trophy to spare, and they made thus a collection
of rifles, shotguns, pistols--some three hundred or more weapons.
These they burned in a heap. Then they sent a wireless message to the
Russian people describing this act, and added further the monition: “Do
likewise; burn your rifles, and return to work!”

“They murdered Nikolai (rubili Nikolai) and his family for liberty,”
said Potapof. “But now clearly there is much less liberty than ever
there was before.”

Nevertheless I thought I detected a curious home-sickness among many of
them. The violent rumours and persistent bad news of Russia comes to a
primitive community that cannot read in a more disturbing and dramatic
way than through newspapers. They complained sadly of conditions in
Canada; of droughts, of plagues of grasshoppers, of bygone hardships
and persecutions in Saskatchewan.

“Here there will be a Bolshevik revolution too,” said one. “We shall
not take part in it. But we know it is preparing. There is much
discontent in the neighbouring settlements and in the mines. Oh yes,
there is trouble brewing here too.”

This Dukhobor had been talking to brother Poles and Ruthenians, but he
was quite out of perspective. I asked how the Dukhobors had faced under
the Conscription Act. Apparently they did not suffer much; Canada did
not trouble the Dukhobors. They had an easier time than their brothers
the Mennonites in the United States. They told me there had been a
considerable influx of Mennonites by way of the unguarded line: they
also are pacifists and utterly oppose to personal service in war. So
struck are they by what happened to them in America through the war
that there is much talk of their deserting both Canada and the States
and seeking a refuge in Mexico.

The Dukhobors, however, have a strong hold in Canada, and as long as
Peter Verigin, their unofficial patriarch and leader, lives, they will
most probably hold on to their settlements in British Columbia and
Saskatchewan. Perhaps in a new era, a new Russia may again take the
Dukhobors to herself. Canada does not assimilate them. They do not
assimilate Canada. And they are, and they feel, as Dostoievsky said,
like “a slice cut out of a loaf.”

[Illustration]

_Fancy meeting the Dukhobors
Up in the Rockies:
A bit of old Russia
Planted up there to meet me!
Sure next time when I go to the Caucasus
I’ll look to find a batch of English there,
Trying to live their unmolested lives
Under the free institutions
Of old Russia._

_Tolstoy, in his story of the old pilgrim,
Taught you could find Jerusalem in your native village,
And did not need to pilgrimage afar.
But he did not say you could find freedom
In your own village--in your own heart.
O no, that’s political,
You must go a long way to find that._

[Illustration: WHEREVER THEY LOCATE THEY BUILD TEMPLES]

XXXVII. A VISIT TO THE MORMONS

WE tramped from ranch to ranch by the rutty roads that skirt the
sections, walked away from the mountain-walls, and ever as we went
the terrain extended. The sky had become wider; no rocky walls closed
us in. The backs of our necks became swollen from the unusual heat
of the sun on them. We kicked up dust as we walked, dust again!
Our eyes traversed the scene to light, not on cascades or possible
camping-grounds, but on far-away farmhouses. We met the oats and
wheat and barley fields striving over the moors, and walked till all
moor disappeared, till there was nothing in front of us but gold.
Made dream-like by the forest fires, the long range of the Rockies
seemed unreal--the mountains which we had climbed became remote and
shadowy--and not part of our destiny. Our only reality was golden
Alberta, which seemed to extend to infinitude, the plateau only
gradually losing its altitude, unfolding and undulating downward--one
vast resplendent area of golden harvest fields.

The sun gleamed on numberless shocks on the right, on the left, and
ahead, and the whole horizon was massed with newly mobilised golden
armies. We walked the rutty roads and were exhilarated, and counted the
wheatfields which we passed, knowing that each, being a whole section,
was a whole mile long.

We discussed a tragical line in one of Lindsay’s poems:

Election night at midnight
Boy Bryan’s defeat.
Defeat of Western silver,
Defeat of the wheat
... Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The blue-bells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas
By the Pittsburg alleys.

Defeat of the wheat! How tragical that sounds in the soul, how
calamitous and appalling! It is like the cutting off of golden youth,
the extinction of all our dreams.

* * * * *

WE boiled our pot by the side of the road; we sought milk and bread at
farmhouses; we slept at night in the wheat with shocks piled on three
sides of us to keep out the wind, and a broken shock underneath us to
keep us soft--and the night sky above us was of swans’ plumage, and all
the golden stalks and stubble about us and above us were exaggerated
among the stars.

Night was very different on the plains from night in the mountains. No
sound of waters, no castellated peaks rising in the moonlight, no sense
of vast unevenness and disjected rocks; but instead, a feeling of being
in a great encampment where the swarming shocks of wheat were tents,
the tents of such a host that the numbers took away one’s breath. The
poet rejoiced. He loved it. The odour of the yellow stalks was a new
breath of life to him--for he was a prairie boy.

The dawn-twilight was long and quiet, and the mornings were serene.
No workers were in sight. The disparity in numbers between men and
wheat was remarkable to my eyes. In Russia, the whole plain would have
been alive with the gay cottons of peasant lads and lasses. But here,
harvesting machinery displaces whole populations of men and women.

Indians began to be numerous on the road as we approached the Blood
Reservation, Indian farm-wagons with women and children sprawling on
the hay at the bottom, and then Indians on horseback, all one piece
with their horses. We left the golden grain behind and crossed the
Reserve. Vachel explained what a squaw-man is--a white who marries an
Indian girl in order to get hold of her portion of land, the Indians of
to-day being almost all of them endowed with land by the Government. We
found again the Kootenai, now brawling through the plains, and bathed
again, and reverted in spirit to those mountains. Then we tramped from
tent to tent across the green wilderness where the Indians lived.
Indian boys in many-coloured garments pranced on their horses, chased
lines of cattle and horses, and kept the lines straight by galloping
incessantly between them from left to right to one end of the line, and
then right to left to the other end.

We met Indians in voluminous seedy clothes, walking with a stoop; men
with gloomy ruminating faces who tried to avoid contact with a white
man. We talked to them; they raised their red romantic faces and glared
at us like owls startled by light. They could not speak English, so
they answered nothing, but just turned out of our way and slouched on.
Or the livelier ones made signs to us. The stout squaws stared at us.
The slender girls on their horses were almost indistinguishable from
boys.

* * * * *

WHAT a beaten-down and untidy place a Reservation is, strewn with
jetsam from the wigwam, hoofed till not a flower remains! The Indians
spend more time on horseback than on foot--they can’t farm, or
won’t farm, and possess only the roughest of comforts. We came to a
Government Practice Farm where Indians were being taught, and saw
squaws working there--but very little sign of decent cultivation on
the reservations. The Indian asks enough on which to live. He wants no
more, will work for no more. He makes plentiful use of canned foods,
and lives from hand to mouth. Hence you never hear of Indian cooks.
It is curious to contrast the genius of the negro for cooking and the
absence of a taste for cooking in the Indians.

* * * * *

AFTER the Indians we came to the Mormons. They were as much surprised
as the Dukhobors. How should Mormons be here? Perhaps we are the first
to make the discovery that the Mormons have invaded Canada. These
are the first Mormons to invite the shelter of the Empire. As usual,
they have made their settlement in a very obscure part, far from the
centre of authority. And if trouble should arise they have only to trek
through the Rockies, and then Uncle Sam and Senator Smoot will protect
them.

We were regaled at farmhouses by sweet Mormon brides, who gave us
bannocks, who gave us of their simmering greengages out of the great
cauldron on the stove. Elders on horseback very politely, and with
many details, showed us the way to Cardston and the Mormon Temple. We
were happily and sympathetically disposed towards the Mormons, and
Vachel, who has taught the Salt-Lake-City girls to dance whilst he
chanted to them “The Queen of Sheba,” has a soft spot in his heart for
the sect. It was really started by a renegade preacher from his own
sect of Disciples, Sidney Rigdon, who revised the unsaleable manuscript
of a novel called _The Book of Mormon_. He conspired with Joseph Smith,
who discovered the book written in aboriginal American hieroglyphics
on gold plates and translated it by the aid of certain miraculous
spectacles into King’s English, or I should say President’s English,
who was murdered; who therefore gave way to Brigham Young, to whom were
revealed many mysteries.

“They are a whole lot nearer to Mahometanism than to Christianity,”
said Vachel. “I think a Mahometan mission to the Mormons might not be a
bad idea as a step on the road towards Christianity.”

* * * * *

WE sat discussing this on the banks of the Kootenai, and I was
facetious:

“Ye Mormons, there is no god but God, and Mahomet is His prophet.
Whereas in Christ ye are now living in adultery and sin, in Mahomet ye
are pure men and women. By Christ, in the after-life there is neither
marriage nor giving in marriage, but in Mahomet connubial bliss for
evermore, attended by your houris and your wives. Don’t say no. Think
it over and I’ll call this afternoon!”

“_Put that in_,” said Vachel. “I think they’ve derived a good deal
from the phallic religions too. They’ve made a much bigger thing of
Mormonism than it was in the days of Joseph Smith. It has got hold of
the sex mysteries. There’s a whole lot of masonry in it. The common
sort of condemnation of the Mormons is all that’s ever been attempted
by way of criticism of them. They’ve been stoned out of all the Middle
West. We have even in Springfield in the Fair-grounds one of their
altars taken from Nauvoo, Illinois, from which they were chased. They
were a mistaken people--but they learned much through tribulation.”

The poet is by temperament on the side of any one or any institution
which happens to be violently attacked. He was greatly interested by
Mormonism, so I naturally heard from him many things in favour of it.
First of all, he felt it had a great future in America--it was not a
dying cult.

“One side of it is getting very popular,” I interjected, with some
mirth. “It’s the word of abuse in England from an injured wife to her
husband--‘_You--Mormon!_’”

“Well, the idea of polygamy does make a strong appeal to the male,”
said the poet. “And the women feel happy in it when it is an accepted
convention.”

“You mean, women only object to clandestine polygamy?”

“There is always jealousy,” said my companion. “But that is another
matter. What I meant about the future of Mormonism did not refer
to polygamy so much. But it’s our first real American religion. It
started in America. It pretends to give American religious traditions.
According to Mormon, one of the lost tribes of Israel came to South
America. Mormonism links America to both Noah and Adam and to the
hand of God. In their belief, too, Christ came to America--He did not
wait till 1492 for Columbus to discover it first. He was here before
Columbus. In Mormonism America is presented with a whole American
tradition, going as far back as the Old World traditions, embodied in
the Old and New Testaments.”

* * * * *

CARDSTON, which at length we reached, is largely a Mormon city. The
Temple, a remarkable structure, exteriorily chaste and beautiful,
dominates the scene, and the clouds rest upon it, obscuring its upper
storeys in cloudy weather. It is not used for general worship; for
that purpose there is a sufficiently ugly tabernacle. It is almost
exclusively for the Mormon sacraments, the sealing of wives and
children, and for the meditational recreation of the elders. Once the
building has been completed and consecrated it will remain inaccessible
to outsiders, but in order to avert suspicion, visitors are shown
over it until that time. We were lucky, as the Temple is very nearly
finished, and it is a rare experience for an outsider to gain access.
There are only eight Mormon Temples in the world, and the rites
performed therein are entirely secret.

The town is mostly inhabited by Mormons, and the great business “pull”
of the sect is evidenced in the technical and structural growth of the
place. The land between the city and the reservations is theirs, and
also much that lies beyond. A strong propaganda for the sect is carried
on all over America, and also in England and in Europe. Women converts
seem especially desired. On the other hand, men of proved sincerity or
simplicity are not rejected. The Mormons have land at their disposal,
and they exert considerable influence on settlers and pioneers of
the West. The elders help to organise business and to mormonise the
community as much as possible. They can be of great help to any young
Mormon starting life. On the other hand strange dooms are said to await
any Mormons who give away their secrets, and apostasy is infrequent.

Some of them are, however, incautious. In my room at the hotel I found
a heap of correspondence left there by the last man who had been in
occupation. It was perhaps indelicate to pry into a Mormon’s private
affairs, but I confess to a human weakness of curiosity under the
circumstances. Here was the basic material for a novel on the Mormons;
letters from one pal to another, letters from girls, sweet letters,
despairing letters, telegrams. Technically there is not supposed to be
polygamy any more, and legally there is not, but in reality something
of the sort goes on, as may be judged from the following letter I
transcribe, one of a packet I brought from Cardston.

S----D,
Mo.

DEAR ----,

I received your letter written on the 21st from Ladysmith, B.C.,
yesterday, but I worked late last night and I had an answer to one
of Ruth’s letters to write that I had put off for a week. So it was
pretty near time to get up rather than to go to bed, but I will just
drop a hurried line to let you know I still live.

I sure am glad to hear you are able to save a little because I also
am trying to save a few pennies also and it sure comes hard. I also
am glad to hear you are in a business that you like but you failed
to tell me just what your line of selling is. What do you sell? buck
handkerchiefs or iron toothpicks. Does Dan travel with you also.
It sure is great to be able to see a lot of the world at some one
else’s expense and your pleasure. I suppose S----d is about like
Vancouver; rainy and not worth a dam. It sure has rained a lot here
in the last few weeks. I believe we have had more rain here this
month than Utah has in a year.

About my wife in Utah. I receive letters regularly. Eight or nine
days apart as regular as 8 o’clock comes in the morning. Every 8
or 9 days I get a letter and just that often I get a letter from
home also. I am going to try to get a vacation and get enough money
to take me back to Utah next summer. I don’t know if I can or not
because I will have to have an operation on my nose right away
because I always have a cold as it is. If I do not keep on having
this cold I now have I will not have the operation, but if it does
not leave me pretty soon I will have the bone taken out and doubtless
lose my chance of getting home.

I sure am glad you appreciate Peggy by now. You know, old Pal, that
you never miss the water till the well runs dry, and it sure is
true when a fellow leaves his friends and is out alone. You sure
appreciate what you did have when it is gone completely. I believe
that a fellow must live a life like we are to really appreciate the
good things in life anyhow. If we did not taste of the sour things
the sweet ones would seem sour to us. By gosh it sure is true in one
respect I miss some one to darn my sox. I try to do it myself but it
is slow work and I get so (nervous?) Try and imagine me sitting all
night darning sox. It sure is a bellina (? hellish) job. I don’t like
it at all.

Well, old pal, I have a Missouri wife now so S----d seems to be a
pretty good place after all. She is a girl I met in church and is
about the size and looks about like Ruth W----. Some girl I will say.
We have been to a couple of parties and to a couple of shows in two
weeks beside being at her place all day last Sunday. Sunday we are
going to have a picnic and take a few pictures, and Monday night a
large masquerade party is on and we are going to it also. So you see
I stop her right off and she don’t object either, I don’t believe.

I wrote W---- a letter on the 3rd of this month and as yet I have
not received a letter. I guess he wanted to have a good time while
his “heaven” lasts, and I don’t blame him either. I believe he is a
little worried over his mission and rather hates to go, but I believe
he will be alright.

I am getting along fine here. I order all the shoes here so I am
the shoe desk manager. The boss gives me all the shoe mail, and I
just order what I want and leave the rest. It is quite a large job,
but our store is not quite as large as Salt Lake’s, but the shoe
department could keep a regular man busy. So you see I am doing fine.
To-morrow is pay-day and I also get a nice raise, so I have no kick
except to darn my sox. They are the greatest worry I have had.

Well, old pal, I gave this letter and your last one pretty good
service considering all the work we have now that the winter business
is just opening up. Here it is after 12.30 again, so I will go to bed
and get up again at 6 a. m. Try to be good, old pal, and don’t do
anything I wouldn’t--Your old pal,
ED.

* * * * *

YOU cannot learn much of the ways of the Mormons by asking them, but
when one of them leaves a whole packet of correspondence behind him in
a hotel he “sure is” giving things away.

We walked up to the Temple at three in the afternoon, the designated
time when visitors are shown round, and punctually at that hour the
doors were opened and the curious were admitted.

“Wherever we locates we builds temples,” said the guide, a curious
old fellow, so illiterate that he strewed the temple floor with his
aitches, an Englishman from the provinces, squat, confidential,
insinuating. “This is the eighth Mormon Temple,” said he. “The ninth is
now rising in Phœnix, Arizona.”

The visitors were mostly farm-women, and Vachel and I looked like a
couple of tramps in their midst. Our clothes hung on us; we held in our
hands a couple of the most weather-beaten of old hats. I was the “big
un” and Vachel was the “little un.” We looked to have a little less
intelligence than gopher-rats.

“The ’ole edifiss is of stone,” said the guide, “and the foundation is
of rock and concrete. There’s not five dollars’ worth of wood in the
construction. All the wood you see is haksessories.”

“Are all the temples built of stone only?” I asked cautiously, with the
air of a stone-mason out of a job.

“No,” said he. “Each is built on a seprit plan.”

“’Ere,” said he, turning to the rest of the company, “’ere we seals.
This ’ere room is for ordinances only. No, we don’t worship in the
Temple. It’s not used for public worship. You see the red-brick
building as you came up to the Temple. That is the Tabernacle where
public worship is held, and that is free to all. But ’ere in the Temple
we ’as the ordinances and the meditations.”

The guide was naturally a Mormon, and as he showed us around I thought
his main objects were to tell us nothing while pretending to tell us
all, and yet at the same time to make converts among the women. He did
all he could to interest the latter in the cooking and lighting and
warming and washing arrangements.

“You ’ave ’ere the electric stoves to cook the meals. You couldn’t
keep running in and out of the Temple in yer sacred garments to get
meals at resterongs, so we cooks ’ere. But there can be no smell of
cooking--as this exhaust takes all the smell away out of the building.
Very convenient, eh, ain’t it? We’ve had over ten thousand applications
from women to come and cook in the Temple.”

The farm-women giggled appreciatively. The guide led them on to the
laundering establishment. As the Mormons wear secret underlinen with
signs, they naturally don’t care to send their laundry out to wash.
And in the Temple we were given to understand every man and woman wore
special white garments. Consequently there would be much laundering.
But all was to be done by the latest machinery, driven by electric
power. “No hand-work, no scrubbing, no drudgery and gettin’ your
fingers red and ’ard,” said the guide. “Then, when the wash is done,
hpp, in they go to the drying chamber, and in a few seconds they are
sufficiently dry to be taken out and ironed on the electric irons.”

For a moment it was like being at an ideal home exhibition. “Then the
radiators,” said the guide, “you see, they don’t project into the
rooms, but are fixed in the walls dead level with the surface of the
walls.”

“Of course the Temple ’asn’t got its upolstery in yet, but in every
room the furniture will be all of a piece with the inlay wood of the
walls. If the walls is oak the furniture will be oak to match; if
it’s bird’s-eye maple, the furniture’ll be bird’s-eye maple; if it’s
Circassian mahogany the furniture will be Circassian mahogany too.
Every room will have its colour scheme. ’Ere you see the thermometer.
Now the temperature of the building will be regulated. It won’t matter
wot the weather is like outside, it will be controlled inside. The
engineer will ’ave ’is orfice outside the Temple and don’t never need
come in. All they ’as to do is telephone ’im to raise the temperature
ten degrees or lower it five and he’ll do it.”

“We comes to the baths” (they are pretty elaborate). “’Ere’s the men’s
section, over there’s the women’s. You natcherally bathe first of all
when you enter the Temple and remove every speck of dust or dirt from
your body. And ’ere are the robing-rooms where spotless garments is
waiting you to put on. You walks all in white wherever you go in the
Temple, and when it ’as been consecrated no more folks will ever go in
it in ordinary clothes like as you and me to-day.”

The Temple proved to be the last word in luxury and modern convenience.
In the most elegant club in London, Paris, or New York I have not seen
such luxury and sensual comfort as was in this Temple in the rough
wild west. Every room was inlaid with precious woods. The baths and
robing-rooms were worthy of a Sultan, the lounge and one-piece carpets
all suggested a material heaven. The guide showed us the vast font
reposing on the life-size figures of twelve oxen, the symbols of the
twelve tribes of Israel. This font was the centre of a stately chamber
with galleries running round it. From the galleries the friends of the
candidates could watch the ceremony of immersion. The font was large
enough to baptize families at once.

“And you can be baptized many times,” said the guide. “For yourself,
then for your friends, and then for the dead--for any one you would
like to have saved.”

“Baptized for the dead?” said one of the women in horror. “Yes,” said
he. “You think it strange, but the early Christians all used to do it.
Just turn up First Corinthians, chapter fifteen. ‘What shall they do
which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are
they then baptized for the dead?’ which shows plainly that the apostles
recommended it.”

“Is the water cold?” asked a farm-girl, timorously.

“Cold,” said the guide ingratiatingly, “oh, no! It’s warmed. It’s just
_nice_. I should say about the temperature of warm milk.”

“Oh!” “Oh!” There was chorus of approval from the women, who had been
considering the whole matter from a purely personal point of view.

We were then led to the Creation Room, the Garden of Eden Room, and the
Earth-natural Room, all adorned with works of art. There were pictures
of the world before Creation, and then of each stage in the process of
Creation.

“God don’t love chaos. ’E’s a great organiser. ’E organised it, and
’e divided the water from the hearth and gave us light and made the
hanimal creation--yes, all that lives and breeves,” said the guide.
“’Ere we meet to meditate on the Creation. Isn’t it a beutiful room?”

Some one asked him if the artists were Mormons. “Yes, all of them,”
said he, and then went on--

“You’d think it gets stuffy in ’ere. But no; we ’as the hair taken out
and washed and then returned. It’s a new device for washing the hair.”

We passed to Eden. Here were pictures of the whole animal creation in
benevolent and sentimental happiness; the tiger browsing beside the
lamb, and the lion and the giddy goat frisking around.

The guide purveyed the story of the Garden of Eden, but left out Adam
and Eve, and I walked away from him to wander round and seek the
portraits of our first parents. They were not included. But I found
that the painting of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and of the
Tree of Life were concave at the base, and that there was a recess and
an alcove to each. So there was a place for a living Adam and Eve to
sit, side by side, when the meditation on the Garden was going on. My
idea is that Eve would be seated in the Tree of Life and Adam in the
Tree of Knowledge. But that is surmise. The guide would not tell us
what the alcoves were for, but in the eye of curious imagination I saw
Adam and Eve sitting there in primitive innocence whilst the hearts of
the elders were inditing of a good matter.

From Eden we went to the Earth-natural, which was a hideous place where
every animal was depicted with a vicious expression. A large mad coyote
or, was it a hyena? seemed to control the atmosphere of the chamber.

“’Ere we ’ave the Hearth after sin ’as crept in,” said the guide. “’Ere
is life as we know it, full of sin which you can’t escape. You can all
learn a great deal from them pictures. Think of Hadam and Eve. ’Ave you
ever thought of it--’ow God gave them the garden of Eden, and of the
‘experience’ ’e made them ’ave there. Isn’t it true about us? ’E didn’t
mean that nothin’ should ever ’appen to us. ’E brought us into the
world that we might ’ave an experience.”

So we went on to the Marriage Room, which was entirely bare, and no one
could say what it would be like when the decorations and the furniture
had been added. I judged it time for me to cease being Simple Simon,
so I asked the guide as humbly as I could whether the marriages were
legal when the ceremony was performed.

“Yes,” said he. “You ’ave a legal marriage.”

“But polygamy?” I queried, and I saw his eyes flame.

“Polygamy ’as been done away with long ago when Utah was received into
the Union,” he answered in a gruff way.

“And what happened to the other wives when it was abolished?” asked
some one else very softly. But the guide did not reply. Instead he
began to hurry us out of the building. We had only seen a third of
it and were loth to go. But there was nothing for it. We managed to
get a last glimpse of an assembly hall with large frescoes on the
walls, depicting Christ distributing the Bread and the Wine to the
Mound-Builders, or Indians of South America, and underneath was written
III. Nephi 15. Another fresco had reference to the Book of Josiah,
which is part of Mormon Holy Writ--found by Joseph Smith, written on
gold plates.

The guide hurried us to the door. “I’ve some pictures of the Temple
for sale,” said he to the farm-women. But they seemed all to have been
scared by my question about polygamy. Vachel and I stopped to look
at the pictures. After all, they were only picture-postcards of the
exterior. We bought three.

“Good-b’ye,” said I. “And much obliged.” And I offered him my hand. He
gave me his left.

“Good-b’ye,” said Vachel. “Most interesting.” And he offered him his
hand. The guide gave him his left also.

“A left-handed shake,” said Vachel, meditatively, as we went down the
steps. “You know what that means.”

“No?”

“That means--Go to Hell!”

* * * * *

WE were much intrigued by all this, and found out that Adam is God
to the Mormons, and Christ only one of a series which culminated in
Brigham Young. Mormonism is the story of a passionate sensual man
with a fake religion, a leader, however, of men and women, capable of
starting a church, murdered and then succeeded by the great Brigham.
The Mormon community, persecuted ever, loathed and detested yet
not destroyed, plunged ever westward through the deserts with new
revelations all the way, always, however, being overtaken by the tide
of other pioneers and chased again. They were secret, and wanted to
be secret. But the United States always overtook them. Now they have
compromised in many ways and are not persecuted, and they multiply and
spread and propagandise. They are disciplined. In politics they all
vote one way--as ordered. They begin to be proud of America.

Vachel and I went up to the Temple at night. It looked like a place
produced by enchantment--the highest thing on the highest eminence
of the widespread but low-built city of Cardston. Clouds hid the top
of it. There was no one near but ourselves, apparently not even a
watchman. The massive gates were locked and barred, and above them
gleamed electric lanterns in large and graceful M’s.

We have learned an elementary lesson about them.

“Remember that, Vachel,” said I. “M for Mormon.”

“The guide said a true word,” said the poet. “God sent us into the
world that we might have an experience.”

* * * * *

WITH that our tramping ended. We left our pine-staffs leaning against a
Cardston wall. We slept in beds again and bought our coffee at a shop.
Gathering prose invaded the clear blue of our poetry. Some sadness,
like a shadow, settled on us. And it was good-b’ye to the mountains.

[Illustration]

_Thy Kingdom come, O Lord,
As once it came,
May it come again!
For once it came upon the mountains,
It came upon the wings of the morning
Amid the flowers and adown the streams.
It came into our eyes,
It came into our hearts.
Thy Kingdom come, O Lord,
As once it came,
May it come again!_

[Illustration: THE WORLD IS MY PARISH]

XXXVIII. BLOOM FOR EVER, O REPUBLIC!

WE crossed the line again and returned to the United States. And then
we went to the city of St. Paul, and we saw the falls where Minnehaha
and Hiawatha met. We stood on the high bank of the Mississippi and
considered meditatively the mounds of the mound-builders there. What
more impressive symbol for a world-traveller than these pre-historic
mounds--there before the Indians came--emblems of the infinite
forgotten past of man! Then we went to Chicago. We saw the beautiful
Wrigley building which has risen to look from drab Chicago over
Michigan Lake--a building raised by the profits of gum! Vachel
introduced me to the first sponsor of his verse, Harriet Monroe, of
“Poetry,” and he described to me how he and W. B. Yeats once divided
the annual poetry prize of Chicago, and how he was to have read aloud
the prize poem--“General William Booth Enters Heaven,” but to the
surprise of the company assembled gave his new, hitherto unheard-of
work “The Congo,” a poem which at that time must have been dumfounding
in its novelty. Then Yeats, who seemed to have snubbed every one
including the poet himself, made a very generous speech in favour of
Lindsay’s genius. And we met Chicago’s poet, Carl Sandburg, a rugged
Scandinavian with brown hair who claimed me as a “Nordic” also. And he
carried a large and old guitar on which he thrummed when reciting his
poems. He has heard Negro Blues in the South, and loves the coloured
folk, and has a whole repertoire of blues which he will sing you if
you will. I had a glass of beer with Sandburg in Milwaukee, the only
glass of anything of the kind offered me this time in these dry United
States. I met Ridgely Torrance, gentle and whimsical, with one long
lock of hair on his head like a Russian khokhol. Curiously enough, he
also had been enchanted by the Negroes and knew more about them than
us all, and he read poetry to us. There I met beautiful Zona Gale of
Portage whom, it is said, nearly every literary man who ever met her
has at some time or other loved. And meeting Zona I met Lulu Bett. We
met delectable Isidora, once queen of Springfield, now queen of another
city. And we stayed with Mrs. William Vaughan Moody, widow of that
dramatist and poet who wrote “The Great Divide” and “The Fire-Bringer.”
We were a rough-looking couple to be a lady’s guests, but Harriet Moody
loves the whole writing world for her husband’s sake and took us in,
and I found in her what so many know--a vivid personality, endlessly
kind. And couldn’t she cook! We loved her for her poetry and we loved
her for her pies.

* * * * *

WE went to Springfield, Illinois, and there we had a general clean-up
and our mosquito netting came back from the laundry marked “Lace; two
pieces.” I visited all Vachel’s cronies and friends and acquaintances
and enemies, and there were articles about us in the _Register_ and
_Journal_ every day for a fortnight, and I spoke to the Radical Kaffee
Klatsch for the celebrated Isidor Levine, and to the Conservative
Luncheon Club for the ubiquitous Elmer Neale, and I spoke to the _Via
Christi_ class for Mrs. Lindsay, and to the High School for Vachel’s
old teacher, and to the readers in the Public Library for Martha
Wilson. I had all the books on Russia put on a table, and I discoursed
upon them. The most-read book was _The Brothers Karamazof_, which
looked as if it had been in every bed in Springfield. We went to the
Negro churches together; we talked to Charlie Gibbs the famous coloured
attorney. We were entertained by Mrs. Warren--Drinkwater’s Springfield
hostess. We could not visit the Governor--he was under arrest. But
we visited the unsuccessful candidate for the governship at the last
election. Vachel discoursed on small-town politics while Mrs. Sherman
made us meringues. The poet introduced me to his sweethearts, who were
of all ages, from twelve to eighty. I made friends with beautiful
little Mary Jane Allen, who danced and glided into and out of our
presence, and smiled at us and lifted her child’s heart to us. And we
called on “Judith the Dancer,” who taught little Mary Jane. Always
along the Springfield streets the sight of the children exhilarated my
companion--“Stephen, I just love them to death,” said he.

I got to be very well known. I had a sort of royal progress in the
street, questioned and smiled at on all hands. “’Scuse me,” they would
say, “those boots, did you tramp in _them_?” or, “How d’ye do? My
little girl heard you give your talk in the school yesterday. She’s
full of it; it was _mighty_ good of you.”

I came to love the people of this little city, and to see the place
with Vachel’s creative eyes. Surely no one ever encountered such
kindness, such real warmth of heart, as I did there. It was very moving
for one who had come right out of the bitterness and quarrels of Europe
and out of the loneliness of London. They know something about living
which we are forgetting. They taught me much, and the poet has taught
me much also--the bounty of good humour and of unfailing kindness and
warmth. I love those who’ve got the strength of heart to lift their
hands to take yours, who open their mouths actually to speak to you.

So I cannot tell the poet what I owe him, and he says he cannot tell
me what he owes me. We made one final quest together, and that was
to Salem where Abraham Lincoln lived a poor man’s life, and learned
mathematics from Dominie Graham and fell in love with the daughter of
his landlord--unforgettable Anne Rutledge. And we paused before the
massive block of granite which marks Anne’s grave, strewn otherwise
with flowers, and refulgent with thoughts. And we read Masters’s
beautiful lines inscribed over the grave:

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union
But through separation.
Bloom for ever, O Republic
From the dust of my bosom!

[Illustration]

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Tramping With A Poet in the Rockies" ***

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