XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”
“Now, Horace Greeley——” said Vachel, opening his “morning strafe” of political conversation.
“Who the —— was he?”
“You don’t know? Why, you’ll be saying you don’t know Shakespeare next. That’s as if J. C. Squire had never heard of Edwin Booth.”
“Well, who was he?”
“He edited the Tribune throughout the Civil War.”
“That all?”
“He said, ‘The way to resume is to resume.’”
“That all?”
“He said, ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,’ and printed it at the head of his newspaper every day.”
“Oh! Did you ever hear of Mudford?”
“No.”
“What, never heard of Mudford, the famous editor of the Standard?”
“No.”
“Ever heard of Nicol Dunn?”
“No.”
“He edited the Morning Post in its better days. Ever heard of Frederick Greenwood?”
“No.”
“Never heard of Frederick Greenwood? Why, he was the greatest journalist England ever produced. He inspired Disraeli with the idea of buying the Suez Canal. If we don’t know about your journalists, I see you don’t know about ours.”
The battery was silenced.
We walked through five miles of rotten-ripe red raspberries and got thorns in our half-naked knees and carmined our fingers with raspberry juice, and we kept spitting out unpalatable fruits and making uncomplimentary remarks. Then we got to open pine woods and freed our feet of the tangles, and Vachel began to sing softly to himself a children’s processional hymn:
We are the Magi,
Children though we are.
We are the wise men,
Following the star.
“There are only two of us.” I ventured. “Where do you think the third king has got to?”
“That’s King Christopher,” said Vachel, sadly. “That’s our ‘other wise man.’ He is with us, but he’s invisible. He is sitting in Greeley Square or Vesey Street, and it was thinking of him that really started me on Horace Greeley.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he said to all the young Magi, ‘quit seeking a star in the East, Go West and grow up with the country. Get into America; find your spiritual roots.’”
“You want to persuade every one to cross the Appalachians?”
“Yes,” said Vachel dreamily. “So I brought him along invisibly. He is our invisible playmate.” And he resumed his children’s hymn.
“You’re a good bit like Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling,” said Vachel to me at last, “You’ve a wonderful geographical background. You ought to read the life of Mark Twain. Very interesting. He was made by his life in Nevada. His life in the silver mining camps and his knowledge of the West and the South made him. Read Roughing It. It’s a great book. Then Kipling with a boyhood in India and a maturity in America owes much to his knowing both West and East. What’s the matter with young men to-day is a disinclination to get their feet dirty. You’re the only man in England or America I’ve been able to persuade to go on a tramp with me. When I proposed it to M——, the English poet, he seemed to turn pale. That’s all behind me,” he said, “though I don’t know what he meant.”
We came within sight of the shore of Lake Josephine. “Shall we ask our invisible companion if he’d like to come in for a swim with us?” said I.
“Why, that would be fine.”
So we broke through to the green and silver lake and, putting our tender feet on the sharp stones and water-covered boulders, waded out to swimming depth and we made a great splash with Napoleon’s beautiful bride. And when we came we vagabondised on the shore for the rest of the day—the three of us—lying stretched out beside a mounting red blaze of rain-washed wood.
The beach was all of little mauve stones which we raked into couches. And there we lay munching hot pea-nuts and rebuilding the world on a foundation of the American Wild West. Vachel drew some more world-maps and adopted our invisible playmate as a member of the society of “astrological geographers,” and we took for our emblem and device the map of the two hemispheres with the motto, “The World is My Parish.”
What a serene evening it was by the side of fair Josephine! A half moon rose over us at nightfall and marsh hens sped through the air in volleying groups of wings. The stars and the moon threw a silver radiance on the line of the mountain-tops and on the forests and on the dimples and lines and circles of the lake. We fell asleep and were warm and at peace. We only waked at four in the morning and then bathed before sunrise and mingled our bodies with the perfect reflections of green and grey and brown and snowy mountain-sides.
The sun arising grew upon us and chased wraith-like mists across the waters, and our fire, hotter than the sun, blazed on the mauve stones and baked us and dried us when we came out to it, and gave us our coffee and gave us all we needed till old Sol was radiant o’er the scene.
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.
THE CHRISTIAN BECOMES SUN-WORSHIPPER ALSO