SHE SENT MORE RAIN AND LAUGHED AGAINXXVII. THE WILLOWS
SHE SENT MORE RAIN AND LAUGHED AGAIN
WhenI 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 sixteen in the city—white children, black children, immigrant European children promiscuously grouped, bright-faced and vivacious and feelingall-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 SpringfieldYea SpringfieldRah...Rah...Rah.
Rah...rah...rah...rah—Spring...field...High...School(repeated four times with gradual acceleration)Yea SpringfieldYea SpringfieldRah...Rah...Rah.
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 whereI 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 incapableof understanding anything till they are moved. That’s how we do things in America, and go ahead, by whoops and yells—Whoopee!”
Rooseveltmade 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 devastated 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 suggestions for twenty minutes. We’re going to get out of here.”
We then plunged into a waste of tightly-packed willow trees, all about ten feet high, with branches thickly interlaced. It was intensely 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 stubbornness 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 littlepools on the floor when we stood still, we were no people for the hotel. And we read on the front door, “No one in hobnails 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, Ha!She laughed at us, she would not help us,She sent more rain and laughed again.
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, Ha!She laughed at us, she would not help us,She sent more rain and laughed again.
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, Ha!
She laughed at us, she would not help us,
She sent more rain and laughed again.