Tramping on Life Part 17

"Lan," as we walked along, "can you tell me more about Phoebe.... Aunt Rachel told me some, but--"

"Oh, she ended up by running away with a drummer ... she hadn't been gone long when her ma got word from her asking her to forgive her ...

that she'd run off with a man she loved, and was to be married to him pretty soon.... Phoebe gave no address, but the letter had a Pittsburgh postmark....

"A month ... six months went by. Then a letter came in a strange hand.

The girl that wrote it said that she was Phoebe's 'Roommate.'" Lan paused here, and gave me a significant look, then resumed:

"Paul went down to bring the body home, and found she'd been buried already. They were too poor to have it dug up and brought home."

"It seems that the man that took Phoebe off was nothing but a pimp!"

Suicide: early one Sunday morning; early, for girls of their profession, the two girls, Phoebe and her roommate were sitting in their bedrooms in kimonos.

"What a nice Sunday," Phoebe had said, looking out at the window.

"Jenny," she continued to her roommate, "I have a feeling I'd like to go to church this morning...."

Jenny had thought _that_ was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....

Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it being Sunday morning. She'd bring in a Sunday paper, too.

When she returned, Phoebe didn't seem to be in the room. Jenny felt that something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....

She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....

She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed. Her eyes were rolled back to the whites from agony. A creamy froth was on her mouth.

And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole d.a.m.n bottle of it.

Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name--loud....

"Phoebe, why don't you speak to me!" Took her head in her lap and it only lolled. Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole house up. And the madame had shouted:

"Shut up, you b.i.t.c.h, do you want people to think someone's gettin'

killed? Ain't we in bad enough already?"

"So Phoebe came to a bad end," commented Lan, "as we always thought she would."

The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon:

Once, in the night, during my week's stay with him, I stepped from bed, sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay.

Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him through the heart with.

But I b.u.mped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave me a b.u.mp as big as a hen's egg, into the bargain.

The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.

"--that you, Johnnie?" called my uncle.

"Yep!"

"What's the matter? can't you sleep?"

"No!--got up to take a drink of water."

"You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed." A pause. He continued: "You must of run into something. I heard a bang."

"I did. I b.u.mped my head into the door."

I visited Aunt Millie last.

I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.

Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile ... with a deep, hoa.r.s.e voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted virility and strength, and wore his s.h.i.+rt open at the neck, and several b.u.t.tons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.

Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being adored in turn by them.

It was "Ma!" here and "Ma!" there ... the voices of the children ever calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters, baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking, talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....

Uncle d.i.c.k loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_....

Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me, with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....

But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my desire to die a poet, and young.... Princ.i.p.al Balling had me come to see him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that, from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to pa.s.s in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me, before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special student at the Keeley Heights High School.

The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Sh.e.l.ley. In English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with his complete works I made myself a nuisance in cla.s.s, never paying attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a trance, and, with Sh.e.l.ley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising the world.

I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced, modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged behind her gla.s.ses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the cla.s.s. Who really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great books as I did.

Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_....

Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's _Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests, little towns on river-bends.

A tramp or sailor--which?

First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and back again?

Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett and Fielding?

It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch.

Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New York waterfront that same afternoon....

I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.