Chapter IX.

That railway journey to Lawrence, Kansas, is as vivid to me now as if it

had taken place yesterday yet it all happened more than fifty years ago.

It was a blazing hot day and in the seat opposite to me was an old

grey-haired man who appeared to be much troubled by the heat: he moved

about restlessly, mopped his forehead, took off his vest and finally

went out probably to the open observation platform, leaving a couple of

books on his seat. I took one of them up heedlessly—it was “The Life and

Death of Jason”, by William Morris. I read a page or two, was surprised

by the easy flow of the verse; but not gripped, so I picked up the other

volume:—“Laus Veneris: Poems and Ballads” by Algernon Charles Swinburne.

It opened at the Anactoria and in a moment, I was carried away entranced

as no poetry before or since has ever entranced me. Venus, herself,

spoke in the lines:

“Alas! that neither rain nor snow nor dew

Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,

Assuage me nor allay me, nor appease,

Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease,

Till Time wax faint in all her periods,

Till Fate undo the bondage of the Gods

To lay and slake and satiate me all through,

Lotus and Lethe on my lips like dew,

And shed around and over and under me

Thick darkness and the insuperable sea.”

I haven’t seen the poem since and there may be verbal inaccuracies in my

version; but the music and passion of the verses enthralled me and when

I came to “The Leper”, the last stanzas brought hot tears to my eyes and

in the “Garden of Proserpine”, I heard my own soul speaking with divine

if hopeless assurance. Was there ever such poetry? Even the lighter

verses were charming:

“Remembrance may recover

And time bring back to time

The name of your first lover,

The ring of my first rhyme:

But rose-leaves of December,

The storms of June shall fret;

The day that you remember,

The day that I forget.

And then the gay defiance:

In the teeth of the glad salt weather,

In the blown wet face of the sea;

While three men hold together,

Their Kingdoms are less by three.

And the divine songs to Hugo and to Whitman and the superb “Dedication”:

the last verse of it a miracle:

Though the many lights dwindle to one light,

There is help if the Heavens have one;

Though the stars be discrowned of the sunlight;

And the earth dispossessed of the Sun:

They have moonlight and sleep for repayment;

When refreshed as a bride and set free;

With stars and sea-winds in her raiment

Night sinks on the sea.”

My very soul was taken: I had no need to read them twice: I’ve never

seen them since: I shall not forget them so long as this machine lasts.

They flooded my eyes with tears, my heart with passionate admiration. In

this state the old gentlemen came back and found me, a cowboy to all

appearance, lost, tear-drowned in Swinburne.

“I think that’s my book”, he said calling me back to dull reality.

“Surely”, I replied bowing; “but what magnificent poetry and I never

heard of Swinburne before.” “This is his first book I believe”, said the

old gentleman, “but I’m glad you like his verses.” “Like”, I cried, “who

could help adoring them!” and I let myself go to recite the Proserpine:

“From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever Gods may be

That no life lives forever,

That dead men rise up never,

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

“Why you’ve learned it by heart!”, cried the old man in wonder;

“learned”, I repeated, “I know half the book by heart: if you had stayed

away another half hour, I’d have known it all” and I went on reciting

for the next ten minutes.

“I never heard of such a thing in my life”, he cried: “fancy a cowboy

who learns Swinburne by merely reading him. It’s astounding! Where are

you going?” “To Lawrence,” I replied. “We’re almost there,” he added and

then, “I wish you would let me give you the book. I can easily get

another copy and I think it ought to be yours.”

I thanked him with all my heart and in a few minutes more got down at

Lawrence station then as now far outside the little town clasping my

Swinburne in my hand.

I record this story not to brag of my memory for all gifts are handicaps

in life; but to show how kind Western Americans were to young folk and

because the irresistible, unique appeal of Swinburne to youth has never

been set forth before, so far as I know.

In a comfortable room at the Eldridge House, in the chief street of

Lawrence, I met my brother: Willie seemed woefully surprised by my

appearance: “You’re as yellow as a guinea; but how you’ve grown”, he

cried. “You may be tall yet but you look ill, very ill!”

He was the picture of health and even better-looking than I had

remembered him: a man of five feet ten or so with good figure and very

handsome dark face: hair, small moustache and goatee beard jet black,

straight thin nose and superb long hazel eyes with black lashes: he

might have stood for the model of a Greek god were it not that his

forehead was narrow and his eyes set close.

In three months he had become enthusiastically American, “America is the

greatest country in the world”, he assured me from an abysmal ignorance;

“any young man who works can make money here; if I had a little capital

I’d be a rich man in a very few years; it’s some capital I need, nothing

more.” Having drawn my story out of me especially the last phase when I

divided up with the boys, he declared I must be mad. “With five thousand

dollars”, he cried, “I could be rich in three years, a millionaire in

ten. You must be mad; don’t you know that everyone is for himself in

this world: good gracious! I never heard of such insanity: if I had only

known!”

For some days I watched him closely and came to believe that he was

perfectly suited to his surroundings, eminently fitted to succeed in

them. He was an earnest Christian, I found, who had been converted and

baptised in the Baptist Church; he had a fair tenor voice and led the

choir; he swallowed all the idiocies of the incredible creed; but drew

some valuable moral sanctions from it; he was a teetotaler and didn’t

smoke; a Nazarene, too, determined to keep chaste as he called a state

of abstinence from women, and weekly indulgence in self-abuse which he

tried to justify as inevitable.

The teaching of Jesus himself had little or no practical effect on him;

he classed it all together as counsels of an impossible perfection, and

like the vast majority of Americans, accepted a childish Pauline-German

morality while despising the duty of forgiveness and scorning the Gospel

of Love.

A few days after our first meeting, Willie proposed to me that I should

lend him a thousand dollars and he would give me twenty-five per cent

for the use of the money. When I exclaimed against the usurious rate,

twelve per cent being the State limit, he told me he could lend a

million dollars if he had it, at from three to five per cent a month on

perfect security. “So you see,” he wound up, “that I can easily afford

to give you two hundred and fifty dollars a year for the use of your

thousand: one can buy real estate here to pay fifty per cent a year; the

country is only just beginning to be developed”, and so forth and so on

in wildest optimism: the end of it being that he got my thousand

dollars, leaving me with barely five hundred, but as I could live in a

good boardinghouse for four dollars a week, I reckoned that at the worst

I had one carefree year before me and if Willie kept his promise, I

would be free to do whatever I wanted to do for years to come.

It was written that I was to have another experience in Lawrence much

more important than anything to do with my brother. “Coming events cast

their shadows before”, is a poetic proverb, singularly inept: great

events arrive unheralded, were truer.

One evening I went to a political meeting at Liberty Hall near my hotel.

Senator Ingalls was going to speak and a Congressman on the Granger

movement, the first attempt of the Western farmers to react politically

against the exploitation of Wall Street. The hall was packed: just

behind me sat a man between two pretty grey-eyed girls. The man’s face

attracted me even at first sight: I should be able to picture him for

even as I write his face comes before me as vividly as if the many long

years that separate us, were but the momentary closing of my eyes.

At the end of this chapter I reproduce a perfect portrait of him and

need only add the coloring and expression: the large eyes were hazel and

set far apart under the white, over-hanging brow; the hair and whiskers

were chestnut-brown tinged with auburn; but it was the eyes that drew

and fascinated me for they were luminous as no other eyes that I have

ever seen; frank too, and kind, kind always.

But his dress, a black frock coat, with low stand-up white collar and a

narrow black silk tie excited my snobbish English contempt. Both the

girls, sisters evidently, were making up to him for all they were worth,

or so it seemed to my jaundiced envious eyes.

Senator Ingalls made the usual kind of speech: the farmers were right to

combine; but the money-lords were powerful and after all farmers and

bankers alike were Americans:—Americans first and last and all the time!

(great cheering!) The Congressman followed with the same brand of

patriotic piffle and then cries arose from all parts of the hall for

Professor Smith! I heard eager whispering behind me and turning half

round guessed that the good-looking young man was Professor Smith for

his two girl-admirers were persuading him to go on the platform and

fascinate the audience.

In a little while he went up amid great applause; a good figure of a

man, rather tall, about five feet ten, slight with broad shoulders. He

began to speak in a thin tenor voice: “there was a manifest conflict of

interests,” he said, “between the manufacturing Eastern States that

demanded a high tariff on all imports and the farming West that wanted

cheap goods and cheap rates of transport.

“In essence, it’s a mere matter of arithmetic, a mathematical problem,

demanding a compromise; for every country should establish its own

manufacturing industries and be self-supporting. The obvious reform was

indicated; the Federal government should take over the railways and run

them for the farmers, while competition among American manufacturers

would ultimately reduce prices.”

No one in the hall seemed to understand this “obvious reform”; but the

speech called forth a hurricane of cheers and I concluded that there

were a great many students from the State University in the audience.

I don’t know what possessed me but when Smith returned to his seat

behind me between the two girls and they praised him to the skies, I got

up and walked to the platform. I was greeted with a tempest of laughter

and must have cut a ludicrous figure. I was in cowpuncher’s dress as

modified by Reece and Dell: I wore loose Bedford cord breeches,

knee-high brown boots and a sort of buckskin shirt and jacket combined

that tucked into my breeches. But rains and sun had worked their will on

the buckskin which had shrunk down my neck and up my arms.

Spurred on by the laughter I went up the four steps to the platform and

walked over to the Mayor who was Chairman:

“May I speak?” I asked:

“Sure”, he replied “your name?”

“My name is Harris,” I answered and the Mayor manifestly regarding me as

a great joke announced that a Mr. Harris wished to address the meeting

and he hoped the audience would give him a fair hearing even if his

doctrines happened to be peculiar. As I faced them, the spectators

shrieked with laughter: the house fairly rocked. I waited a full minute

and then began: “How like Americans and Democrats”, I said, “to judge a

man by the clothes he wears and the amount of hair he has on his face or

the dollars in his jeans.”

There was instantaneous silence, the silence of surprise at least, and I

went on to show what I had learned from Mill that open competition was

the law of life, another name for the struggle for existence; that each

country should concentrate its energies on producing the things it was

best fitted to produce and trade these off against the products of other

nations; this was the great economic law, the law of the territorial

division of labor.

“Americans should produce corn and wheat and meat for the world”, I

said, and exchange these products for the cheapest English woolen goods

and French silks and Irish linen. This would enrich the American farmer,

develop all the waste American land and be a thousand times better for

the whole country than taxing all consumers with high import duties to

enrich a few Eastern manufacturers who were too inefficient to face the

open competition of Europe. “The American farmers,” I went on, “should

organize with the laborers, for their interests are identical and fight

the Eastern manufacturer who is nothing but a parasite living on the

brains and work of better men.”

And then, I wound up: “this common sense program won’t please your

Senators or your Congressmen who prefer cheap claptrap to thought, or

your superfine Professors who believe the war of classes is ‘a mere

arithmetical problem’ (and I imitated the Professor’s thin voice), but

it may nevertheless be accepted by the American farmer tired of being

milked by the Yankee manufacturer and it should stand as the first