Tramping on Life. Harry 1883-1960 Kemp
understanding and sympathetic. And mine was offish … of a different species.. wearing his trousers always neatly pressed … and his neckties—he had them hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.
I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.
I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor … my shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.
"Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What kind of a boy are you, anyhow?"
He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked. But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions. It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost … groping … in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous, shapeless thoughts.
Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic imaginations took possession of me.
And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a childishness, an innocence toward him.
Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a son, Jimmy, about seven. …
It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls … that when I became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my business, single. …
After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father would end proudly with—
"Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All he cares about is books."
So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going on within me.
Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christianity (or thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to God. A need as strong as physical hunger.
Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I prayed to be pure … like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden—and yet achieved great quests and were manly in their deeds. …
The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.
I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book of star-maps I possessed.
I wanted, was in search of, something … something … maybe other worlds could give this something to me … what vistas of infinite imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!
Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading books on astronomy … Newcomb … Proctor's Other Worlds … Camille Flammarion … Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers … and novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus. …
During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching blackness of night:
"O God, make me pure, and wonderful … let me do great things for humanity … make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed—till one day, having kept myself wholly for her as she has kept herself for me—give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will be mine … mine … all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."
Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not understand … and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.
The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched," still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars … and about great men whose biographies I was reading … and about Steele's Zoology I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of learning. …
Silvia was a rose, half-opened … an exquisite young creature. Alva was gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.
In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen stove, alone, studying our lessons—the place given over entirely to us for our school work.
A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my power of feeling fluttered into my fingers … and when we kissed, each night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done—the thought of their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to bed.
I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.
I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by no means my last, I hopped a freight.
I was absent several weeks.
When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I grew talkative about my adventures, too.
I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips to dry.
In the Composite Works I discovered a new world—the world of factory life.
I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts … and men and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell as of rubbed amber—the characteristic smell of composite when subjected to friction. …
And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social unease do.
They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong, sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts … deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.
Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding, squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with women.
They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed