XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE
Many years ago one of the Springfield newspapers offered a prize to the reader who should send in the best answer to the question: What would you do with a million dollars? Young Vachel sent in an answer. His was: “I would change them to dimes and have them thrown into the State House yard and any one who wanted them could come and take as much as he liked.” The answer was printed in the paper with a lot of others and gave considerable offence. The telephone was kept busy that morning by those who thought fit to tell his father and mother that they ought to look after him better and not let him make a fool of himself.
“I did not get the prize,” said Vachel sadly. “The editor probably thought that with a million dollars one could do just a million dollars’ worth of good. He thinks, as does my dearest friend, that you can employ people to do good at a salary, and the one who got the prize probably allotted ten thousand dollars to this charity and ten thousand dollars to that and endowed this thing and endowed that and did not even dare to buy himself an ice-cream soda. They’ve got such a high idea of money that it’s almost an attribute of God himself. Now, I rank money low. I’m right up against the weekly magazine advertisement point of view—‘Doing good is only possible when you’ve a lot of money. Get money! Oh, get money first somehow, then you can do good. Wear good clothes and then you’ll be in the way of doing good.’”
We had made our camp under a great overhanging rock beside rushing cataracts. The huge vague scenery about us was made more immense by a cloud screen which prevented one knowing exactly how high the mountains were, and we looked outward at a vastitude of scarred precipitous cliffs. Our fire warmed the rock against which we had laid our blankets, and we had found a delightfully cosy place in which to be at home. Night came down upon us, but we lay long in the flamelight and talked.
“I don’t think,” said Vachel, “that this money incentive is really a strong one or leads far. That is where I part company with the radicals of this country. They have all founded their faith on the economic theory of history. I’d like to write for them a ‘romantic theory’ of history. I believe in the romantic theory; I do NOT believe in the economic theory.”
“All right, dear Vachel,” said I constrainedly. “There are only you and I present, and God. Say it more quietly.”
“Vanity and ambition have always been stronger motives than the desire of gain. And that is good. I put vanity a whole lot higher than greed. In a country of hogs the peacock is a praiseworthy bird.”
“You say that because you are a peacock.”
“I know it. I am a Peacock. I am not a Hog.”
“All right, Vachel. Now, if money is not so strong an incentive how do you account for the fact that in your own beautiful State of Illinois Governor Small has been under arrest for appropriation of funds, and at Chicago members of one of the greatest baseball teams in America are under trial for selling championship games to the other side?”
“That’s the influence of the magazine advertisement—praise of dollars and the implication that everything in the world has a commercial value or it has no value. And there are no other honours but money honours.”
It was evidently more that a mere opinion of my companion. It was a creed. He passionately believed what he said. And thus it was that I discovered in Glacier wilderness a very rare bird, the American black swan, and that in the poet of Springfield whom the village in its ignorance was once scandalised about.
Vachel told me how he acted on his creed—What is greater than the power of money? why, contempt of money—and set off without a dime to see America and live, and how the good God took care of him until he got to California. “In that way I learned to respect myself and to respect my fellow-man,” said he. “I learned what a lot of good poor men and women there are in America. And I have nothing to complain of individuals as such. I could always rely on brotherliness. But it was different with institutions, when I went to people who were not themselves but hirelings, people hired to do good. Don’t I know the minions of charity? What are the places where as a tramp I’ve had the stingiest treatment in the world? Why, in institutions from the paid organisers of charity.” And he told of how he once went to a Y at H——, Mo., and the fight he had to get mere soap and towel and a bath.
“By Gosh, they weren’t going to give it to me. I said ‘I’ve been a Y.M.C.A. worker myself in New York for years and I know that soap and towel can be had. I know the whole workings of the organisation and I’ll have soap and towel from you if I have to bring the roof down. I’ll go to the editors of the newspapers. I’ll go to the leading ministers and preachers of H—— and I’ll hold you up to shame to the town. I’ll whale you.’ And I got soap and towel and they said, ‘take him down,’ and I got a bath, though I used as much energy to get it from them as would have served to do three days’ hard work. Now I know that if I had gone into any working man’s home in town and asked for it, or even into a hotel I’d have got soap and towel without demur.
“Yet my best friend says, ‘Vachel, you’re morbid on the subject of money.’ I said to him ‘Well, there’s a lot in the New Testament about it. Look it up!’”
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!
WE CLIMBED UP WITH THE TREES
BUT CAME DOWN WITH THE WATERS