Tramping with a poet in the Rockies

I:

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

E CHOP E - W H IT H E R 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 C E N T R A L

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

gT. VITUS DAY

TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES

BY

STEPHEN GRAHAM

AUTHOR OF "EUROPE — WHITHER BOUND?
WITH THIRTY-EIGHT EMBLEMS BY

VERNON HILL

D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY

INCORPORATED

NEW YORK LONDON

1936

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

All rights reserved. This book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form ivithout permission of the publisher.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

F

1 PREFACE

Ed

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 Dan-
iel 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
E did you see in Palestine?" This is rapturously
v 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 enter-
tainer. 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,

v

vi PREFACE

and the modern artificial way of life. At the
same time, despite his poetry, he is almost inartic-
ulate. 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 accom-
panied 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 Cen-
tury 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 ift
stuffy cities and stuffier offices, the picture of the

PREFACE vii

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 Cen-
tury Magazine, you may be sure that the entire
staff, inspired by this example, has started vaga-
bonding." Another, a facetious scribe, wrote:
"It is conceded by everyone that Stephen Gra-
ham'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 Cal-
endar."

viii PREFACE

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 1. It does not
rhyme with satchel. The poet asked me to tell
you that.

Stephen Graham

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Tramping Again ..... i

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 Down-
ward 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

XL National Wildernesses ... 71

XII. Going West TJ

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

ix

X

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

XVIII.

Making Maps of the World

PAGE

. 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.

• 151

XXV.

Stopped by the Clouds .

. 158

XXVI.

Lindsay on Roosevelt

> 165

XXVII.

■ 171

XXVIII.

Johnny Appleseed

. 177

XXIX.

, 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.

• 231

XXXVI.

• 239

XXXVII.

A Visit to the Mormons .

• 247

XXXVIIf

"Bloom For Ever, O Republic

!" 274

TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES

I. TRAMPING AGAIN

Well, it's good to be going tramping again.
I've been sitting in European cafes 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

I

2 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

TRAMPING AGAIN 3

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, / 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

4 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

TRAMPING AGAIN 5

haunts — "where Lincoln dreamed in Illinois."
The poet thinks that the world could be re-
generated 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,

6 TRAMPING WITH A POET

where the waters of the new world flow north
and east and west —

«4r

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 he kissed all night by
wild-flowers in the grass!

II. FINDING THE POET

Flora, Illinois, where one changes for Spring-
field, 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

7

8 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 in-
auspiciously 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 elan and
zest for the unornamented reality that America

FINDING THE POET 9

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 every-
where 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

io TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 out-
side 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.

FINDING THE POET n

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 morn-
ing 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 in-
sects 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 !

12 TRAMPING WITH A POET

I HAD an idea I was finding my poet at Spring-
field— 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, winged 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."

«4r

FINDING THE POET 13

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.

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

14

TAKING THE ROAD 15

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. Euro-
pean life-rivers have flowed into these deserts
and made them what they are. One day their
children perhaps will have a Western conscious-
ness, an American consciousness.

1 6 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 im-
mense 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 pro-
visions and steered a north-westerly or west by
north-westerly course by our compasses, abjur-
ing trails and guides. Our idea was to obtain a
cross-section view of the Rockies in their most
primitive state unguided by convention. We

TAKING THE ROAD 17

hoped to realise something of what America
was like for at least a hundred years after Colum-
bus 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 en-
compassed on each side by exuberant pink lark-
spurs 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

1 8 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

TAKING THE ROAD 19

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 after-
noon stood high above the lovely length of
water which we identified as Medicine Lake.

20 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

•H-

l^enT TO A Mouse

A11D I KTlOCKeO AT THt DOCHV
BUT THe OLD LADY SAID

i HAve seen you ceforve

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 con-
trast 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

21

22 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 hang-
ing 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 be-
fore 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

FIRST NIGHTS OUT 23

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 be-
longing 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."

24 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

FIRST NIGHTS OUT 25

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 phan-
tasmal 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, tu-
multuous 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 under-
growth 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

26 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 in-
tense darkness under the giant pines we lay and
heard it, and slept, and then waked to hear it
again.

FIRST NIGHTS OUT 27

// 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.

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

28

GOING UP TO THE SNOW 29

yards away from where we slept, and hoped
tacitly that they would take the bacon and spare
us.

Our knapsacks weighed double next morn-
ing 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, dis-
pensing 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 im-
politely 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 grert
struggle, and Lindsay and I held different

30 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

GOING UP TO THE SNOW 31

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 home-
ward 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

32 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 moun-
tain-wall which obscured the adventures of the
new day.

«<r

GOING UP TO THE SNOW 33

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.

V A p- °

W A v

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."

34

WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD 35

Another relief is the absence of advertise-
ments, 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 be-
lieve 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 down-
ward, 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 down-
ward at each uncertain step.

36 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 supply-
ing 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

WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD 37

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 com-
panion. 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 down-
ward 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 ver-
dant pit of the stream. We clambered down-
ward 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

38 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 com-
panion, "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 with-
out any money, and in the hospitality and
kindness of the farmers he had won a per-

WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD 39

sonal faith in the common man and a re-
liance 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 tell-
ing 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."

ft*

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.

"THEY OUTSTAYED US AND WILL OUTSTAY U

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

40

SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS 41

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

42 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 seri-
ously 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

SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS 43

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 north-
ward.

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

44 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 foot-
steps 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 grass-
hopper in, and I'll go light a fire so as to be ready
to cook the fish."

So I fastened my fat green wooden gentle-
man 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.

SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS 45

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 com-
passes. We thought of the night and of our
empty wallets and insides. "Just think of Broad-
way at this minute," said Vachel. "Still swelter-
ing in heat, not yet lighted up for evening pleas-
ure." We felt far from civilisation, and sighed
at last for what we despised. "Or think of Pic-
cadilly 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.

46 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

Vachel seemed surprised, but agreed with alac-
rity: "I'm for it," said he.

<<•<■

The greedy old mountains have been to our knap-
sacks

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!

mPMSONtD IN THE
V1LV/LESS 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

47

48 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 slew 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 pre-
cipitous, 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

NIGHT ON THE MOUNTAINS 49

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

5o TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 moun-
tain had been thrown down and that which pris-
oners 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 slight-
est 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 sup-
port, 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

NIGHT ON THE MOUNTAINS 51

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

52 TRAMPING WITH A POET

the end for me. I would go no ^urther. I gave
the halloo to Lindsay and got into shelter. He
came down the way I had come, laboriously, cau-
tiously, 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.

«■<■

The Guardsman and the Western Bard1

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

1 Contributed by "Rusticus" to the New York Evening Post
at this point in our adventures.

NIGHT ON THE MOUNTAINS 53

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 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).

WHen He
is in pai

HG CALLeTN

FOMHeDOTae

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."

54

"GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER" 55

"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

$6 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

"GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER" 57

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 boil-
ing 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 Pro-
testant or a Catholic, and the fire-ranger con-
fessed he did not know the ins and outs of
Sinn Fein. And no, there had not been a

58 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 cer-
tainly 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

"GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLERS 59

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 help-
ing himself with them, too, just for com.
pany.

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

60 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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. UA 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
gclden line."

"GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER" 61

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!

^"""""'Mil,,

+

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 con-
versation:

Before the beginning of years

There came to the making of man

Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran.
62

CLEAR BLUE 63

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 our-
selves to sun and ice.

The sun literally blistered the skin, and we re-
clined 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-

64 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

CLEAR BLUE 65

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 be,
came 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 com-
munity are called Irvingites in England. They

66 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 sim-
plicity. 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 mediaevalism
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

CLEAR BLUE 67

as Oliver Lodge was Barnumised," said the
poet. "It's the worst of commercialised lectur-
ing. Literary lions are imported by specu-
lative 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

6% TRAMPING WITH A POET

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, sur-
charged 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

CLEAR BLUE 69

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 Fe, is the spiritual capital of America.
Texas plunges southward like a root — don't
draw it too small. Oklahoma is a pistol point-
ing 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, Mis-
souri, 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 Missis-
sippi and Missouri Rivers secondarily. The
Rocky Mountans 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 —

70 TRAMPING WITH A POET

so we go following nature's trail out to the
wilderness."

«4-

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.

you HAve cone to de ALDNe wrm

YOUK H6AM

XL 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,"

71

72 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 wilder-
ness— 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

NATIONAL WILDERNESSES 73

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 Batter-
sea to Buckingham. I find a belief in the wilder-
ness 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 re-
creation— as naturally as people used to go to

74 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 English-
men interested in America to visit them, go

NATIONAL WILDERNESSES 75

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 Eng-
lishmen are born trampers and lovers of the
wilderness, and are ready to reverse the Amer-
ican 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 re-
freshment hiking through the wild places of the
West.

We talked of this exuberantly as we clam-
bered 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.

76 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

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.

\

^""tllUjj

hia

\

SBtS

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 ad-
mitted 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

77

78 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 sepa-
rate 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 nothing-
ness?

"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

GOING WEST 79

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 umimaginable 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.

80 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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 in-
stinct 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.

GOING WEST

Si

«<c

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.

C KO S S I N G

CkEAT

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 advan-
tage of the thousands of wind-smitten trees which
lay dead, piled at every angle and piled on one
another.

82

CLIMBING RED EAGLE 83

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 up-
turned 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 di-
rection 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
suoper. 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 re-
sumed their downward track, clashing and

84 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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. Never-
theless 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
Een.

The sun went down, the shadows below us
deepened, the snow banks multiplied themselves
in number, and their outlines and suggestive-
ness 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 pro-
miscuity 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

CLIMBING RED EAGLE 85

"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

86 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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. In-
deed, 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

CLIMBING RED EAGLE 87

He 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 laconic-
ally 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 per-
dition.

I lay and I lay, and Vachel sat unmoving,
and we heard, as it were, the pulse of the world.

88

TRAMPING WITH A POET

We did not see humanity's prayers going up
to God. We only saw the stars and the
night.

«4r

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.

WHEJVE
GO THE

rm ANTELOP*. wru
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

89

90 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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. Con-
stantly 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

DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE 91

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 with-
out 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 J"

92 TRAMPING WITH A POET

And as in going up the mountain the
winning of the summit was continually deferred,
so in descending to the valley we only con-
quered 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 mis-

DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE 93

chance, 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.

94 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"Call it 'Doing the Impossible' and think-
ing well of ourselves," adds the poet when I read
this to him :

4

"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.

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

95

96 TRAMPING WITH A POET

suddenly to come on a large congregation of
tourists. Going-to-the-Sun Camp is a spec-
tacular 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,

PEOPLE IN CAMP 97

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 un-
used. 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 North-
ern Rockies,

98 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 earn-
ing 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 con-

PEOPLE IN CAMP 99

stituency 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 sunshirre 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.

* t*

ioo TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

HE IS ONLY A
WILD BLAST WHEN
TREATED L1K.E A WILD
BE AST

+r

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

IOI

102 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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?

VISITED BY BEARS 103

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 over-
tures 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 ad-
ventures of Emerson Hough and others. Now
without dogs or guns the bear has been won
over and he has ceased ot 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

io4 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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."

VISITED BY BEARS 105

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 re-
pented 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

106 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

f

*.->

VISITED BY BEARS 107

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.

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

108

LINDSAY'S STONE COFFEE » 109

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 her-
self above us, and only slowly and very unob-
trusively 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 inter-
stellar spaces grew lustrous and more lustrous,
and the mountains more and more romantic.
Our eyes were religiously and adoringly spell-
bound. Our hands — our feet — that is a dif-
ferent 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

no TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

LINDSAY'S STONE COFFEE in

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, how-
ever, 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
ioo 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 mos-
quito net sufficient to hold the coffee and the
stone. Tie up carefully like a plum-pudding,

ii2 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 immer-
sionist. 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 hold-
ing 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 shoul-
ders. "Thadd touches the spadd," says he in
happy relief.

|p |p |p

LINDSAY'S STONE COFFEE 113

Coffee shoud 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 pots
And it will rise to your persuasion.

But the commonest cause of coffee being just

indifferent

Is your indifference towards the coffee.

O TH6 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 signature*

114

MAKING MAPS 115

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 promon-
tories. 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*

n6 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

MAKING MAPS 117

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 serf in them in
19 19. 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."

n8 TRAMPING WITH A POET

A poetical map of the world has never yet
been drawn. "It should have ships on its
oceans and lighthouses on its rocks and mer-
maids 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 ad-
ventures of daring sailors. Then put in the
Panama Canal, symbol of utilitarianism and our
modern life. Draw in the Bering Strait, which
is the prehistoric 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

MAKING MAPS 119

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."

A

i2o TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

XIX. A MOUNTAIN
POINT OF VIEW

"WiTE man, you's skeerln' 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.

121

122 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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 sew-
ing 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 micro-
scopical insects we were upon it!

We came to the top of the Valley of Boulder
Creek, stretching away from the heart of the

A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW 123

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 aperc,u 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

124 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 terrific-
ally 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,

A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW 125

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 re-
marked 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 inter-
spersed. 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.

126 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

' I HAD R^iTHEfc. BE A PE, ACOCK, THAN A
HOC ' SAID THE PEACOCK.

XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE

Many years ago one of the Springfield news-
papers 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 consider-
able 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.

127

128 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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.'

» 5>

We had made our camp under a great over-
hanging 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

BY THE CAMP FIRE 129

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

130 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 im-
plication 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 passion-
ately belived 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

BY THE CAMP FIRE 131

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

132 TRAMPING WITH A POET

get it from them as would have served to do
three days' hard work. Now I know that if 1
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 !' "

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!

*

c^

//.

o

V

*

<*>

u/t CLirMSfcO \jy \V1TH THE TRIES
t>UT CATVfc DOUN V_/lTHTHt VAT IAS

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 imagin-
able plaything for young and old, from dolls as
large as three-year-old children to family por-
trait albums that, having a musical box in their
binding, played uThe Old Folks at Home"
and various hymn-tunes when you opened

133

134 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 wait-
ing 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 ad-
vertisement drawing. My poems did not sell,

DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN 135

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 Govern-
ment and they had never seen a dog or a
cat. Curiously friendly little companions!

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

We went down Cataract Mountain the came
way as the water, down to flower-spread meads

136 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 lim-
pidity 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

DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN 137

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

138 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.' "

*

Oxford has asked Chicago
To lend its purifying aid
To the King's English.
O Oxford/ O Bridges!

+

XXII. " GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

II

"Now, Horace Greeley " said Vachel,

opening his "morning strafe" of political con-
versation.

"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. "

139

140 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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

"GO WEST, YOUNG MAN" 141

knees and carmined our fingers with raspberry
juice, and we kept spitting out unpalatable fruits
and making uncomplimentary remarks, '/hen
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.

11 There are only two of us." I ventured.
11 Where do you think the third king has got

to?"

11 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?"

142 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"Yes," said Vachel dreamily. " So I
brought him along invisibly. He is our in-
visible 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 disinclina-
tion 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 com-

" GO WEST, YOUNG MAN " 143

panion if he'd like to come in for a swim with
us? " said I.

11 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

144 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

|> Jp \g>

" GO WEST, YOUNG MAN H 145

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.

/ I \

TH6 CHMSTIAI1 BECOAeS SUIV»
WOKSHIPPfP, 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

146

THE SUN-WORSHIPPER 147

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 off-

»>

spring—

" Enough, enough 1 Is there any more
booze? "

11 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.

148 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

THE SUN-WORSHIPPER 149

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. ? "

u

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,

t 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

ISO TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 ! "

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!

0 prohibit it!

THE WW) CATCHETH THE
EAK OF THE PM/MTIVE

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

IS I

152 TRAMPING WITH A POET

rolled." I have heard the " gigantic trouba-
dour 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;

TWO VOICES 153

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 Kamakura.

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

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 Kamakura.

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

154 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 Kamakura 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,

TWO VOICES 155

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 com-
mon 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 midwinter 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.

156 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

TWO VOICES 157

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!

/ 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.

<«fcClOUO*Cvi6 0tf<*

*#

&*

^ones to se

5

&

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 knock-
ing 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

158

STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS 159

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 en-
tangled 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 water-
fall 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 ad-
vanced 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

160 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS 161

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

1 62 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 water-
fall 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

STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS 163

us. We found November's home, where sweep-
ing 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.

«<■

i64 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 aesthetically 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!

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 more-
over found a foot-trail, and, "Bless de Lo'd Fse
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

165

1 66 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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. c 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,
Jook 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;

LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT 167

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

1 68 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 head-
way. 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 role 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.

LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT 169

" I was for him until the end of his Presi-
dency," 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."

11 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, imitat-
ing 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

170 TRAMPING WITH A POET

maliciously. " And he did not believe in the

families ruling America "

No wonder we got lost in the willows.

d'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?
Vse sheered 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)

'c*a> ^

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 six-
teen in the city — white children, black children,
immigrant European children promiscuously
grouped, bright-faced and vivacious and feeling

Tl

7*

172 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

THE WILLOWS 173

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

174 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 dev-
astated 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 sug-
gestions for twenty minutes. We're going to
get out of here."

THE WILLOWS 175

We then plunged into a waste of tightly-
packed willow trees, all about ten feet high,
with branches thickly interlaced. It was in-
tensely 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 stubborn-
ness 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

176 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 hob-nails 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.

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, Hal

She laughed at us, she would not help us,

She sent more rain and laughed again.

s

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$

* "Uȣ ǣ* ^

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 ! "

177

i78 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

JOHNNY APPLESEED 179

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,

i8o TRAMPING WITH A POET

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
iby 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 cele-
brated 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.

JOHNNY APPLESEED 181

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

1 82 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

JOHNNY APPLESEED 183

Thackeray advised us —

How to live on nothing a year.

"Take a nice little house in May fair;

Ordet 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 May fair 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.

HenCEFOKTH I CALL Y6 nOT SeRVATlTS
BUT FKienDS

■fr

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

184

LOG-ROLLING 185

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 Business-
man'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-

"J'-

«T'l

1 86 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 down-
ward," 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

LOG-ROLLING 187

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 earth-
quake 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

188 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

LOG-ROLLING 189

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."

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

190

TOWARD THE KOOTENAI 191

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
week 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

i92 TRAMPING WITH A POET

kitchen." And he said to the poet with a dis-
appointed 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

TOWARD THE KOOTENAI 193

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

i94 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 surrep-
titiously 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 dis-
turbed by an unwonted cry and a shout, and a
red-faced, large-eyed, half-breed Indian sud-
denly 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 out-
fits and party-frocks.

I lay in the water after that and thought it

TOWARD THE KOOTENAI 195

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.

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
Corn-pared with what they knew they meant to us.

* *&

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cf&iKnny

«%

%

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

196

AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD 197

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 along-
side 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 on-
ward 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 barri-
cade right to the fire, and they landed one after

198 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 dis-
appear, but goodness knows where they go to.
Our fancies stream upward idly like little flaming

AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD 199

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 dear. One was left

200 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

«4r

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.

>>

# + EA^.

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,

20I

202 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 203

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
Re rose out of the very depths of American life.

"What Lincoln did, any boy in the United

204 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 205

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 Spring-
field 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

206 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 Ffat 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,

THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 207

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 lead-
ing 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.

208 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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, sup-
porting 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 ap-
proved for the improvement of the city. All
promised well. Then suddenly this race-riot
broke out, and Springfield was the subject of

THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 209

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 prosecu-
tions followed. Lynch is powerful when law
is weak.

210 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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."

THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 211

"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 fire-light
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.

iiz TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

>}

GOOD DAY tt* 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

213.

214 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN 215

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

216 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 Govern-
ment protected game in these parts. The
Flat-Heads seemed to have swept off every-
thing. 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 reser-
vations 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 poli-

FLAT TOP MOUNTAI N 217

tician 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 straw-
berries inside the shop, and I strongly recom-
mend 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

2i8 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 "rasp-
berry epic." Down, down we plunged to the
dark valley of the rushing Kootenai, only find-
ing 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

FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN 219

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.

f ft

220 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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!

a / .

S4 40 |

AM6W(

V/eve seer^j/auf* Unc of cuPF&rcnoe and
vneA^ecL tt with. Indifference .

XXXIV. CROSSING THE
CANADIAN LINE

"As we approach the British Empire," says
Vachel facetiously, "the huckelberries 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 huckle-
berries. 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

221

222 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 super-
fluous 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

THE CANADIAN LINE 223

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. UA11 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

224 TRAMPING WITH A POET

conversation. He began to chaff me merci-
lessly on the subject of the Empire and King
George and the British lion. I chaffed him
about "God's own country." The poet identi-
fied 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.

THE CANADIAN LINE 225

It is almost a recognised convention in litera-
ture. 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 identify-
ing 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 19 17, by a leading
magazine of America, to write an account of
Rasputin, and although I had many interest-
ing 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 19 19 a realistic vision
of America in perhaps her saddest post-war

226 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 some-
thing 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

THE CANADIAN LINE 227

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 un-
guarded; 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

228 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 hypo-
thesis 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.

THE CANADIAN LINE 229

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.

«4r

230 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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.

WELLINCTONIA

WASHINCTONIA

HINDEN&UPXER

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,

231

232 TRAMPING WITH A POET

as if they were No. i 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 'Washing-

tonias.' "

"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 'Hin-
denburgers.' "

Apropos of Bluchers — in the first Canadian

THE DIFFERENCE 233

village we visited the cobbler for repairs. He
was an old man, and explained to us just
exactly what "Blucher shoes" were. He pro-
nounced 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-

234 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 uni-
versities 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 cer-
tainly 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: / DO LOVE TO CUDDLE; and on the main
beam of the ceiling was written: Patrons are

THE DIFFERENCE 235

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 ac-
cidents. 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 Build-
ing, 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 mur-
mured. We named the beautiful grouping of
mountains about the lake as the Star Granary.
For at night, with stars above and star-reflections

236 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 play-
fulness 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 dis-
approved 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 DIFFERENCE 237

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-popula-
tion. 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."

238 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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."

We're on the same continent.

Well, I don't knozv. 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 smellf

Well, smell that Union Jack!,

That's it.

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

239

24o TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 ex-
patriation 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

DUKHOBORS 241

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 never-
ceasing wind which brings no rain is driving
over the corn-fields. As you approach the
village you begin to see Russian peasant men

242 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 head-
man, 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, Saskat-
chewan, and the main settlement of Brilliant,
British Columbia.

Potapof was a boy at Cyprus, where his
father enojyed 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

DUKHOBORS 243

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 con-
temporary 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

244 TRAMPING WITH A POET

we'll think of feeding them.' " But their de-
liberations 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, shot-
guns, 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 com-
plained sadly of conditions in Canada; ©f
droughts, of plagues of grasshoppers, of bygone
hardships and persecutions in Saskatchewan.

"Here there will be a Bolshevik revolution

DUKHOBORS 245

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 settle-
ments in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
Perhaps in a new era, a new Russia may again

246 TRAMPING WITH A POET

take the Dukhobors to hercelf. Canada does

not assimilate them. They do not assimilate

Canada. And they are, and they feel, as

Dostoievsky said, like ua slice cut out of a
loaf."

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.

WHEKEVEIV THEY LOCATt
THEY &UILD 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

247

248 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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,

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 249

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' plum-
age, 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

250 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 dis-
places 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 sprawl-
ing 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-

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 251

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 rumin-
ating 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

252 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 plenti-
ful 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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 253

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 ha: 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 hiero-
glyphics 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 Mahomet-
anism 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:

254 TRAMPING WITH A POET

"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 Spring-
field 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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 255

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 com-
panion. "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

256 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 re-
markable structure, exteriorily chaste and beau-
tiful, 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 com-
pleted and consecrated it will remain inaccess-
ible 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,

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 257

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 mor-
monise 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 correspond-
ence 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

258 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 p,

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 handker-
chiefs or iron toothpicks. Does Dan travel
with you also. It sure is great to be able to

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 259

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

26o TRAMPING WITH A POET

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
tvork and I get so (nervous?) Try and im-
agine 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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 261

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

262 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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, con-
fidential, insinuating. "This is the eighth
Mormon Temple," said he. "The ninth is now
rising in Phoenix, 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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 263

construction. All the wood you see is hak-

sessories."

"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 arrange-
ments.

"You 'ave 'ere the electric stoves to cook
the meals. You couldn't keep running in and

264 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 the are suffi-
ciently 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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 265

rooms, but are fixed in the walls dead level
with the surface of the walls."

"Of course the Temple 'asn't got its upol-
stery 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 '11 be bird's-eye maple; if it's Cir-
cassian mahogany the furniture will be Circas-
sian 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

266 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 267

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 -recom-
mended 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 ap-
proval from the women, who had been con-
sidering 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 organ-
iser. '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

268 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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 paint-
ing 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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 269

Tree of Life and Adam in the Tree of Knowl-
edge. 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.

11 '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

270 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 271

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 poly-
gamy. 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 in-
teresting." And he offered him his hand.
The guide gave him his left also.

"A left-handed shake," said Vachel, medi-
tatively, 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 suc-
ceeded by the great Brigham. The Mormon

272 TRAMPING WITH A POET

community, persecuted ever, loathed and de-
tested yet not destroyed, plunged ever west-
ward 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 dis-
ciplined. 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

A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 273

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.

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!

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 con-
sidered 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

274

BLOOM FOR EVER! 275

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,

276 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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

BLOOM FOR EVER! 277

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 Conser-
vative 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 — Drink-
water's Springfield hostess. We could not visit
the Governor — he was under arrest. But we
visited the unsuccessful candidate for the govern-
ship 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

278 TRAMPING WITH A POET

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,

BLOOM FOR EVER! 279

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 beauti-
ful 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 !

(6)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES

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