Chapter IX

Behold Mike and me in a fairyland set with jewels, in the remotest part of the Bermudas, far from the maddening crowd of tourists. The house is white limestone, set upon a rocky shore overlooking a little bay, behind which the sun sets every evening. Out on a point in front of us stands an old ruin of a mansion, deserted, but having a marvelous mahogany staircase inside so that we can assure the children it was once the home of a pirate chief. The water is brilliant azure, shading to emerald in the shallows; over it flies the man-o’-war bird, snow-white, with a long white feather trailing like a pennant. The sun shines nearly always. There is a tennis court, surrounded by a towering hedge of oleanders in perpetual blossom. There are roses, and a garden in which a colored boy raises our vegetarian vegetables. The house is wide and rambling, with enough verandas so that both halves of this two-family utopia can sleep outdoors.

Mike is working on his autobiographical novel--it was published under the title of _The High Romance_. I am writing _The Millennium_, a play, and we write our health book together--I won’t tell you the name of that, having changed my ideas to some extent. I have brought a secretary with me, and Mike has half her time, the salary being added to that “debt of honor” of which we keep a careful account. There is a Swedish governess who takes care of my son and the two Williams children impartially; also Mike’s wife has an elderly friend to assist her. There is Minnie to do the housework for all of us--Irish Minnie who danced with the college professors at Helicon Hall. Our utopia contains a total of twelve persons, and my five thousand dollars exactly suffices for the fares and the six months’ expenses.

Then _The Metropolis_ is published and sells eighteen thousand copies, barely justifying the advance; so there are no more royalties, and I am stuck in a strange land, without money to get the family home! Mike volunteers to go to New York and find a publisher for the health book, our common property; he will get an advance and remit me half. He goes, and places the book with the Frederick A. Stokes Company; he collects an advance and puts it all into his own pocket--and I am stuck again!

I borrow money from somebody and come home. Mike and his family go to California, and he takes up his old drinking habits and gets another hemorrhage; the next thing I hear, he has sought refuge in the religion of his childhood. He told all that in _The High Romance_; Saint Theresa came to him, and proved her presence by making him smell a rose as he was walking down the street. That was a miracle, and by it Mike knew he was one of the elect. That any hypnotist could have worked a hundred such miracles--could have caused Mike to smell all the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la-la--that had nothing to do with the case.