Tramping on Life Part 87

"Gregory! Gregory!" the crowd was calling, half in derisive jocularity, half in uneasy admiration....

The trainer shunted me into the cage, after seating his lions in a half-moon on their tubs.

"Quick! Step in! We'll be on the outside ready with hot irons in case anything goes wrong!"

I didn't know whether the trainer was jesting or serious.

"Don't think of them at all. They'll sit still ... you can turn your back to them and face the audience. It will be safe. Only don't make any unexpected, quick motions."

I was in among them. The door clanged behind me.

n.o.body jeered now. All was filled with an expectant hush.

Then, as if strange and a-far from myself, I stepped easily into the very centre of the half moon of squatting beasts, and made my speech ...

at the end, there was hardly any applause till I was safely out of the cage ... Then there was a tumult. Shouts, cat-calls, whoops, and a great noise of hearty hand-clapping.

I stood beside the ropes as the people of Laurel surged by, many of them shaking me by the hand ... Vanna came by, with the big football player with her, bulking behind her slight loveliness ... lightly she put a tiny, gloved hand in mine ... a glove neatly mended at the fingers ...

congratulating me, half with feeling, half with amus.e.m.e.nt....

"That was reckless and brave, Mr. Gregory."

I was speechless with frightened delight over her words, and the pressure of her hand.

I turned to the trainer before I went to my room over the tin-shop.

"You say the leopards are most dangerous?"

"Yes."

"For twenty-five dollars a night I will go in with them, alone, and run them around with a whip." As I proposed this, in the background of my consciousness was the conviction that by so doing I could win Vanna's love....

"No ... the leopards are too uncertain."

The papers were full of my deed. And I was not made fun of, but commended. And it was announced (for advertising purposes only, of course) that the management of the show had approached me with an offer to travel as a trainer of wild animals.

The second night I was rather blase. I shook my finger playfully in the face of one of the seated lions ... to have a sensation of a thousand p.r.i.c.kles running sharp through each pore, when the lion responded with an open, crimson-mouthed, yellow-fanged snarl; I smelt the carrion fetor of his breath. I stepped back rather quickly. All the animals grew restless and furtive. Little greenish-amber gleams lit and flickered in their eyes.

I pulled myself together. Deliberately I turned my back on them.

"--So you see plainly, ladies and gentlemen, that a lion is, after all, a much misrepresented, gentle beast."

The trainer was piqued when I walked out, that night.

"I don't want you to tell the people that my lions are harmless and gentle ... if you do that to-morrow night, I'll see to it that you get the medal, and not the money."

The afternoon of the following day, while the girl who trained the leopards was in the cage of the latter, they jumped on her, and tore her back with their claws. Dripping with blood, she whipped them back, inch by inch, into their living-cage, that led by a small door into the big one used for exhibitions. A s.h.i.+ver ran through me at the news of the girl's mishap. I was glad they had not taken me up as regards the leopards. And my being among the lions now also seemed less of a joke.

At least, that last night, I felt it not to be, I delivered a constrained discourse and only breathed freely when outside their cage.

And in a few weeks my unique and single glory was s.n.a.t.c.hed from me. The show had moved to Salina, and a barber in that town had shaved their keeper in the cage, while the lions sat around.

Before leaving for my projected summer as worker on the boats of the Great Lakes, I s.n.a.t.c.hed at a pa.s.sing adventure: the Kansas City _Post_ had me walk from Laurel to Kansas City with the famous walker, Weston.

The man was going across the continent a-foot. When he saw I was sticking the fifty miles or so with him, he became friendly and talked with me of the athletes of former days ... the great runners, walkers, fighters, oarsmen ... and he knew intimately also many well known journalists and literary men of whom he discoursed.

Time and again, like a bicycle pedalled too slow, he stepped awry on so small an obstacle as a cinder, and toppled over on his face like an automaton running down.

"No, no! Don't touch me. I must get up myself ... that's not in the game ..." his rising was a hard, slow effort ... he regained his feet with the aid of his metal-tipped cane....

"Keep back! Keep back!" to the people, gangs of curious boys mostly, who followed close on his heels. And he poked backwards with the sharp metallic point of the stick....

"People follow close on me, stupid, like donkeys. If I didn't keep that point swinging back, when I slacked my pace or stopped they would walk right up on me...."

Dr. Percival Hammond, managing editor of the New York _Independent_. the first magazine to print my poems, came to town ... to lecture on his favourite topic of international peace.

It occurred to me strongly that I ought to afford him some witness of my grat.i.tude for what his magazine had done for me.

Though broke, I borrowed ten dollars from the owner of a lunch counter where I ate.

"I want to give a dinner to Dr. Hammond ... his magazine has helped me as a poet ... it is obvious that I can't give the dinner at your lunch counter."

Ten dollars was all the lunchcounter man would lend me.

But Walsh Summers of the Bellman House said I could give a luncheon in honour of Hammond at fifty cents a plate ... he would allot me two tables ... and a separate room ... and I could invite nineteen professors ... and he would throw in two extras for Jack Travers and myself.

I gave the lunch, inviting the professors I liked best.

After dessert and a few speeches I told them how I had borrowed the money. Hammond privately tried to pay me back out of his own pocket, but I wouldn't let him.

I asked Hammond if he knew Penton Baxter.

"Yes; we printed his first article, you know ... just as we gave you your start....

"Baxter is the most remarkable combination of genius and jacka.s.s I have ever run into. But don't ever tell him that I said that. He has no sense of humour ... everything is of equal import to him ... his toothache is as tragic as all the abuses of the capitalist system."

On the way to the Great Lakes there are several people I must stop and see, and show myself to.