Vachel Lindsay

“ A negro guided me to the lantern of a freight conductor. The conductor had the lean frame, the tight jaw, the fox nose, the Chinese skin of a card-shark. He would have made a name for himself on the Spanish Main, some centuries since, by the cool way he would have snatched jewels from ladies’ ears and smiled when they bled. He did not smile now. He gripped his lantern like a cutlass, and the cars groaned. They were gentlemen in armor compelled to walk [28] the plank by this pirate with the apple-green eyes. We will call him Mr. Shark. ”

“ We had seen swamps of parched palmettos [19] set afire by wood-burning locomotives whose volcanic smoke-stacks are squat and wide, like those on the engines in grandmother’s third reader.
We had met Mr. Terrapin, Mr. Owl, Mrs. Cow, and Master Calf, all of them carved by the train-wheels, Mr. Buzzard sighing beside them. We had met Mr. Pig again at the cracker’s table, cooked by last year’s forest-fire, run over by last year’s train. But what had it mattered? For we together had had ears for the mocking-bird, and eyes for the moss-hung live oaks that mourn above the brown swamp waters. ”

“ Every dwelling was as eternally and uniformly damned as its neighbor, making the eyes ache, standing foursquare in the presence of the insulted daylight. Every porch and railing was jig-sawed in the same ruthless way. Every front yard was grassless. Everything was made [141] of wood, yet seemed made of iron, so black it was, so long had it stood in the wasting weather, so steadily had it resisted the dynamite now shaking the earth. ”

“ The manner of serving coffee in a caboose is this: there are three tin cups for the white men. The negro can chew sugar-cane, or steal a drink when we do not look. There is a tin box of sugar. If one is serving Mr. Shark, one shakes a great deal of sugar into the cup, and more down one’s sleeve, and into one’s shoes and about the rocking floor. One becomes sprinkled like a doughnut, newly-fried, and fragrant with splashed coffee. The cinders that come in on the breath of the shrieking night cling to the person. ”

“ Flagman was asleep for all night, with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. Stretched above Flagman’s back was Mr. Vermont, like a school-boy asleep on his desk. I said, “Do you see the gentleman on the bottom of the pile? He is the Grand Lama of Cabooseville. You have to ask him for the password. The man on top is the sublime sub-Lama.” ”

“ There is something of breeding in the very color of blood. Come, brothers of the road, all who travel with me in fancy, will you not join the knighthood of the soap-kettle? Come, ladies in mansions, will you not be one with us? ”

“ She can turn the slave to a woman, the woman to something a little more than mortal. Oh, how bravely, with the same life-giving red, with the last of her virgin strength, she blooms and blooms on almost every highway. We find her on the road to Benares, on the road to Mecca, on the road to Rome, and on the road to Nowhere, in Tennessee. ”

“ Lady Iron-Heels was the last to go over the ridge. She saw me gather buds from both those bushes by the spring. She made a gesture of salute with her hoe.
I never travelled that way again. I passed by quickly; therefore I had a glimpse of what she was intended to be. “He that loseth his life shall find it.” I see her many a time when I am looking on scattered rose-leaves. She was a woman, God’s chief rose for man. She was scorned and downtrodden, but radiant still. I am only saying that she wore the face of Beauty when Beauty rises above circumstance. ”

“ Shark, I would like to ride to Macon in the caboose.” Mr. Shark thrust his lantern under my hat-brim. I had no collar, but was not ashamed of that. He said, “I have met men like you before.” He turned down the track shouting orders. I jumped in front of him. I said, “You are mistaken. You have not met a man like me before. I am the goods. I am the wise boy from New York. I have been walking in every swamp in Florida, eating dead pig for breakfast, water-moccasins for lunch, alligators for dinner. ”

“ At length came noon, and a meal given with heartiness, as easily plucked as a red apple. For half an hour after dinner in that big farm-house we sat and talked religion.
O pagan in the cities, the brand of one’s belief is still important in the hayfield. I was delighted to discover this household held by conviction to the brotherhood of which I was still a nominal member. Their lingo was a taste of home. “Our People,” “Our Plea,” “The pious unimmersed.” Thus did they lead themselves into paths of solemnity.
Then, in the last five minutes of my stay, I gave them my poem-sermon. ”

“ I hoped for a farm-hand’s house. Only in that sort will they give free lodging so near town. And, friends, I found it, there on the edge of the second cornfield. The welcome was unhesitating.
I looked at my host aghast. To satisfy my sense of the formal, he should have had the dignity to make him Father Adam, and lord of Paradise. How could one round out a day that began loftily with Death, and continued gloriously with some one mighty like the Devil, with this inglorious type now before me? He wrecked my allegory. There is no climax in Stupidity. ”

“ She held it higher. “There is the spinning wheel.”
“Where is the loom?”
“Up stairs, just by where you will sleep.”
I knew that if there was a loom, it was a magic one, for she was a witch of the better sort, a fine, serious witch, and a princess withal. Her ancestors wore their black hair that simple way when their lords won them by fighting dragons. She was prouder than the pyramids. If the epic is ever written, let it tell how the spinner of the wizard wools did stand to serve the stranger, that being the custom of her house. This was a primitive camp indeed. There was no gingerbread. ”

“ He turned to me: “Your supper is now in the kitchen, ‘if what we have is good enough.’” It was the usual formula for hospitality.
I turned to the wife. “My dear woman, I did not know that this was going on. It is not right for you to set a new supper at this hour. I had enough on the road.”
“But you have walked a long way.” Then she uttered the ancient proverb of the Blue Ridge. “‘A stranger needs takin’ care of.’”
In the kitchen there was a cook-stove. Otherwise there was nothing to remind one of the world this side of Beowulf. I felt myself in a stronghold of barbarian royalty. ”

“ The wagon-track now followed a section of the Pennsylvania railroad, and railroads are anathema in my eyes when I am afoot. There appeared no promising way of escape. And now the steel rails led into a region where there had been rain, even this morning. More than once I had to take to the ties to go on. When the mud was at all passable I walked in it by preference, fortifying myself with these philosophizings:—
“Cinders are sterile. They blast man and nature, but the black earth renews all. Mud upon the shoes is not a contamination but a sign of progress, eloquent as sweat upon the brow. ”

“ THE MAN WITH THE APPLE-GREEN EYES
Remember, if you go a-wandering, the road will break your heart. It is sometimes like a woman, caressing and stabbing at once. It is a mystery, this quality of the road. I write, not to explain, but to warn, and to give the treatment. Comradeship and hospitality are opiates most often at hand.
I remember when I encountered the out-poured welcome of an Old Testament Patriarch, a praying section boss in a gray log village, one Monday evening in north Florida. ”

“ But now the smothering landscape seemed to double every natural fear. The hills were so steep and so close together that only the indomitable corn and rye climbed to the top to see the sun. The road was in the bed of a scolding rivulet. People in general travelled horseback. Cross-logs for those afoot bridged high above the streams every half mile. There was a primeval something about the heavy chains of the cross-logs, binding them to the trees, that suggested the forgotten beginning [98] of an iron people, some harsh iron-willed Sparta. ”

“ As the cinders crunched, crunched, underfoot, the conviction deepened: “These ovens are not mere works of man. Dying sinners snared and corrupted by Oil City are carried here when the city has done its work—carried in the wagon of Apollyon, under bunches of green bananas. Body and soul they are disintegrated by the venomous oil; they crumble away in the town of oil, and here in the town of ovens, the fragments are burned with unquenchable fire.” ”

“ After one has ventured one hundred and fifty miles through everglades and spent twenty-four sleepless hours riding in freight-cabooses the marrow of his bones is marsh, his hair and clothes are moss, cinders and bark, his immortal soul is engine-smoke. Feeling just so, I had entered Russell’s law office. He was at court. I sent word by his partner that I had gone to school with him in Ohio, that I had mailed a postal last Sunday from Florida telling him I would arrive afoot in three weeks,—but here I was, already. ”

“ I stepped into the highway that circumscribes the tremendous amphitheatre of Cashier’s Valley. I met not a soul till eight o’clock that [64] night. The mountain laurel, the sardis bloom, the violet, and the apple blossom made glad the margins of the splendidly built road; and, as long as the gingerbread lasted, I looked upon these things in a sort of sophisticated wonder.
This was because the gingerbread was given me by a civilized man, to whom John Collier had written for me a letter of introduction: Mr. Thomas G. Harbison, Botanical Collector; American tree seeds a specialty. ”

“ Oil City, in her better suburbs, as a collection of worthy families in comfortable homes, may have much to say for herself. But as a corporate soul she has no excuse. The dominant, shoddy architecture is as eloquent as the red nose of a drunkard. ”

“ To those crushed by the inventions of cities, wounded by evil men, it will be a washing away of tears and of blood. Yea, it will be to them all, what it was to my heart that day, the sweet, sweet blowing of the reckless pipes of Pan. ”

“ She remembers Love, but not too well, if love is pain. There is no yesterday that can daunt her and keep her dear heart-laughter down. In springtime her magic petals bring God to the weary and give Heaven’s strength to the wavering of heart. ”

“ The highway is irrelevant. The highway is slipshod. The highway is as the necklace of a gipsy or an Indian, a savage string of pebbles and precious stones, no two alike, with an occasional trumpery suspender button or peach seed. Every diamond is in the rough.
I was walking between rugged farms on the edge of the oil country in western Pennsylvania. ”

“ Mr. Temperance climbed to the observation chair in the little box at the top of the caboose, alternately puzzling over my Wings of the Morning, [2] and looking out. The caboose bumped like a farm-wagon on a frozen road. The pine-burning stove roared. The negro Adonis on the wood-pile had gold in his teeth. He had eyes like dark jewels set in white marble, and he polished lanterns as black as himself.
“By Jove,” I said. “That’s the handsomest bit of lacquer this side of the Metropolitan Museum.”
“’Sh,” said Conductor Roundface, sobering himself. “You will queer yourself with the old man. ”

“ Meanwhile, in the big houses of the veteran miners of the villages are the axe, the blanket, and the frying-pan, though their lords have been through half a dozen fortunes since [66] pioneer days. Those houses have the single great advantage of a rich tradition. They seem to grow up out of the ground.
Musing these matters, I munched my gingerbread, walking past sweet waterfalls, groves of enormous cedars, many springs, and one deserted cabin. I was homesick for that great civilized camp, New York, and the sober-minded pursuit of knowledge there. ”

“ We went into the parlor, distinguished as such by the battered organ. The mother had Frank and Jimmy sit in semicircle with her and big Frank, while I plunged into my rhymed appeal. After the dynamite of the day I did not hesitate to let loose the thunders. I did not hesitate to pause and expound:—the poem being, as I have before described, many stanzas on heroes of history, with the refrain, ever and anon: God help us to be brave. No, kind and flattering reader, it was not above their heads. Earnestness is earnestness everywhere. ”

“ Let all the readers of this tale who hope to become Gentlemen of the Road take off collars and cuffs, throw their purses into the ditch, break their china, and drink their coffee from tinware to the health of Mr. Shark, our friend with the apple-green eyes. Yea, my wanderers, the cure for the broken heart is gratitude to the gentleman you would hate, if you had your collar on or your purse in your pocket when you met him. Though there was heavy betting against him, he becomes the Hero in a whirlwind finish. Patriarch and Flagman disputing for second, decision for Flagman. ”

“ Only an aviator or a bird has a right to spurn the ground. All the rest of us must furrow our way. Thus will our cores be enriched, thus will we give fruit after our kind.”
[185] Whistling pretty hard, I made my way. And now I had to choose between my rule to flee from the railroad, and my rule to ask for hospitality before dark.
At length I said to myself: “I want to get into a big unsophisticated house, the kind that is removed from this railroad. I want to find an unprejudiced host who will listen with an open mind, and let me talk him to death.” ”

“ Next morning was Sunday, a week since Easter. Only when a man has sadly mangled feet, and blood heated by many weeks of adventure, can he find luxury such as I found in the icy stream next morning. The divine rivulet on the far side of the field had been misnamed “Mud Creek.” It was clear as a diamond.
Always carrying a piece of soap in my hip pocket, I was able to take a complete scour. Not content with this (pardon me) , I did scrub shirt, socks, underwear, and bandanna. I hung them on the bushes, thanking God for the wind. ”