WE CLIMBED UP WITH THE TREESBUT CAME DOWN WITH THE WATERSXXI. DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN
WE CLIMBED UP WITH THE TREESBUT CAME DOWN WITH THE WATERS
Vacheltold me once, to save his self-respect, he took a job in Chicago in a department store at seven dollars a week, and was employed in the wholesale toy department; a whole block of toys, where was to be found every imaginable plaything for young and old, from dolls as large as three-year-old children to family portrait albums that, having a musical box in their binding, played “The Old Folks at Home” and various hymn-tunes when you openedthem. He told how a lad called Timmins wound up all the albums he could lay his hands on, and laid them open and went away to another part of the building, and of the wild din that ensued.
Timmins was “fired.”
He told how he lived amid acres of dolls and how, to satisfy the fire insurance inspectors, a three-foot clearance was made between the top of the toy heaps and the roof, and how all one night they did overtime slamming down rows and sections of dolls and toys on to waiting trucks, and they were rushed to another place. Then the inspectors came and passed the building. And when they were gone the Ghetto came and bought the “bum dolls” from the “smash dump,” and Vachel and the rest were soon building toys up to the roof once more.
“Butnone of my friends liked my earning my living in this way. They’d prefer to see me in a bank or an insurance office. You see, I could not paint a picture that would keep me. I would not enter commercial art—I mean advertisement drawing. My poems did not sell,and people thought I had spent long enough studying and loafing, and that I ought to begin to earn a decent living. So I went into the Chicago Department Store. They did not like that. So I took to the road again. Curiously enough, Francis Hackett took a job in that same store before his star arose.”
Vachel and I had a great pow-wow by night and morning fire, and I cannot set down half here in these (I hope) dignified paragraphs. But all the while we sat and talked, the prairie rats sat about us on their tails and haunches, and stared curiously with their forepaws on their chests like good masons in their rituals. They smelt the beans, they smelt the cheese, they smelt the corn-beef hash; they knew they were protected by the United States Government and they had never seen a dog or a cat. Curiously friendly little companions!
After the cloudy night there was a serene morning. When the veils were lifted off the mountains we knew them for just what they were. They did not go all the way to the sky after all.
We went down Cataract Mountain the same way as the water, down to flower-spread meadsand 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.
Wemade our way along Haystack Butte toward Mount Grinnell, which, like a mighty fortress, stood facing us in the line of our tramp. Was it the beauty of the garden or was it the limpidity of the streams that set us talking of England? It is a peculiarly happy subject with the poet, who, with all his Americanism, has a true reverence for the fountain of English. This July, just before setting out for the Rockies, he received an invitation from Robert Bridges, the British poet laureate, to become amember 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 Imade 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 ChicagoTo lend its purifying aidTo the King’s English.O Oxford! O Bridges!
Oxford has asked ChicagoTo lend its purifying aidTo the King’s English.O Oxford! O Bridges!
Oxford has asked Chicago
To lend its purifying aid
To the King’s English.
O Oxford! O Bridges!