It was somewhat inconsistent to add, "There's a bully place--sneak in
and let her get past me again. But she won't catch me following next
time!"
While he tried to keep up his virtuous anger, he was steering into an
abandoned farmyard, parking the car behind cottonwoods and neglected
tall currant bushes which would conceal it from the road.
The windows of the deserted house stared at him; a splintered screen
door banged in every breeze. Lichens leered from the cracks of the
porch. The yard was filled with a litter of cottonwood twigs, and over
the flower garden hulked ragged weeds. In the rank grass about the slimy
green lip of the well, crickets piped derisively. The barn-door was
open. Stray kernels of wheat had sprouted between the spokes of a rusty
binder-wheel. A rat slipped across the edge of the shattered manger. As
dusk came on, gray things seemed to slither past the upper windows of
the house, and somewhere, under the roof, there was a moaning. Milt was
sure that it was the wind in a knothole. He told himself that he was
absolutely sure about it. And every time it came he stroked Vere de Vere
carefully, and once, when the moaning ended in the slamming of the
screen door, he said, "Jiminy!"
This boy of the unghostly cylinders and tangible magnetos had never
seen a haunted house. To toil of the harvest field and machine shop and
to trudging the sun-beaten road he was accustomed, but he had never
crouched watching the slinking spirits of old hopes and broken
aspirations; feeble phantoms of the first eager bridegroom who had come
to this place, and the mortgage-crushed, rust-wheat-ruined man who had
left it. He wanted to leap into the bug and go on. Yet the haunt of
murmurous memories dignified his unhappiness. In the soft, tree-dimmed
dooryard among dry, blazing plains it seemed indecent to go on growling
"Gee," and "Can you beat it?" It was a young poet, a poet rhymeless and
inarticulate, who huddled behind the shield of untrimmed currant bushes,
and thought of the girl he would never see again.
He was hungry, but he did not eat. He was cramped, but he did not move.
He picked up the books she had given him. He was quickened by the
powdery beauty of Youth's Encounter; by the vision of laughter and
dancing steps beneath a streaky gas-glow in the London fog; of youth not
"roughhousing" and wanting to "be a sport," yet in frail beauty and
faded crimson banners finding such exaltation as Schoenstrom had never
known. But every page suggested Claire, and he tucked the book away.
In Vachel Lindsay's Congo, in a poem called "The Santa Fe Trail," he
found his own modern pilgrimage from another point of view. Here was
the poet, disturbed by the honking hustle of passing cars. But Milt
belonged to the honking and the hustle, and it was not the soul of the
grass that he read in the poem, but his own sun-flickering flight: Swiftly the brazen car comes on.
It burns in the East as the sunrise burns.
I see great flashes where the far trail turns.
Butting through the delicate mists of the morning,
It comes like lightning, goes past roaring,
It will hail all the windmills, taunting, ringing,
On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills--
Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills.
Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn,
Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn.