Chapter XV: Part 15

Reduced again to my barest equipment, and having left as my forwarding address the office of the _National Magazine_, in New York, I hopped a freight shortly after dawn. It was a fast, through freight. Because of lack of practice I boarded it clumsily, and almost went to my death under its grinding, roaring wheels, there in the Laurel freight-yards. I sat, trembling with the shock to my nerves, on the bumpers.

I hopped off at Argentine, just outside of Kansas City.

I found a camp of tramps and joined with them. We drank coffee together....

But, somehow, the scales had fallen from my eyes. My old idealisation of the life of the tramp, somehow or other, was entirely gone--an idealisation that had, anyhow, been mainly literary, induced by the writings of Jack London, Josiah Flynt and Maxim Gorky.

Now, as I listened to their filthy talk ... their continual "Jesus-Christ'-ing" over everything they said, I grew sick of them. I got up and walked away stiffly--never again to be a tramp.

The reporter of the _Star_, who covered the stockyards, took me to a little sturdy cattle merchant, who agreed to ship me to New York, in care of five carloads of calves ... for a fee of ten dollars. I persuaded him that I would mail him that ten on arrival at my point of destination ... I have never done so ... when I had it, I needed it more for myself ... and, anyhow, I earned that ten.

* * * * *

My duties with the calves were not many ... merely to walk along the sides of the five cars in my keeping, and see that the calves kept on their legs and did not sprawl over each other ... sometimes one of them would get crushed against the side of the car, and his leg would protrude through the slats. And I would push his leg back, to keep it from being broken ... I made my rounds every time the freight came to a halt.

There were other cars, filled with steers, sheep, and pigs.

Each kind of animal behaved according to its nature, during the trip. The steers soon accepted their cramped, moving life rather stolidly. The calves acted as if dumbfounded, in stupefied, wide-eyed innocence ... the sheep huddled as sheep do ... but the big fat porkers were the most intelligent ... like intelligent cowards that fully know their fate, they piled in heaping, screaming, frenzied masses ... in scrambling heaps in the centre of their cars ... suffocating, stinking, struggling closer and closer together and leaving great, bare areas unoccupied on either end....

"A pig has no sense in a car ... or anywhere."

"Seems to me they have ... they act as if they know what they're in for, at the other end of the line."

"By golly, that's true! I never thought of it that way before!"

So conversed the head brakeman and I.

My calves soon grew to know me. They bleated, in a friendly manner, as I walked by, overseeing them, when the freight stopped.

* * * * *

We had bumped along as far as Buffalo. There the stock were driven down an incline into yards fenced in with white-washed boards, for their second rest, required by law,--before launching on the last leg of their journey down the middle of New York State, and along the Hudson ... consigned to Stern and Company of New York....

Some of them were to be butchered there and afford apartment-dwellers lamb stew, tenderloins, and pork chops ... others to be driven aboard cattleboats, for Europe....

* * * * *

At Buffalo I was ripe for a change. Also I wished to pick up threads of former experiences and acquaintanceships ... to have a good gossip about the Eos Art Community ... I called up Laston Meunier who had been at Eos and whom I had first met there ... who loved bohemian ways, and welcomed wandering artistic and literary folk at his home in Buffalo.

"Where are you now?" Laston asked, over the phone.

"I'm calling you from the stockyards," and I told him what I was doing....

"Come on up to my house, and forget your five carloads of calves ... they can weather through the last jump, to New York, alone ... what does it matter?... they're going to be butchered in a few days."

Looking about this way and that, to make sure I was unseen, I took my grip in my hand, hopped aboard a street car outside the stockyards, and abandoned my calves to their destiny.

Meunier welcomed me. He invited me to stay at his house for several weeks. His pretty, young wife, smiling whimsically, showed me to a room she had already set in dainty order for me.

* * * * *

Meunier had gone to his office....

Nichi Swartzman, the tall Japanese genius, showed up, and Bella Meunier, Nichi, and I ate breakfast together.

Swartzman was, and is, a magnificent talker ... a torch of inspiration burned brightly in his brain, with continual conversational fire.

But he must have his drink. Several of them. Which Laston's wife poured for him abundantly.

After breakfast I sprawled on the floor ... I always sprawl on floors instead of sitting in chairs....

Swartzman and Bella Meunier and I talked and talked and talked ... of Poe ... of Baudelaire, of Balzac....

Then Nichi launched forth on a long disquisition on Japanese and Chinese art, and Mrs. Meunier and I gladly remained silent during the whole morning, enchanted by the vistas of beauty which Swartzman's words opened for us.

"Why," I thought, "must such a man lack audiences? If civilisation were in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is _alive_. His fire wakes kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching to the corpse-minded, the dead-hearted? like so many of our professors and teachers!"

I found out afterward that Nichi Swartzman was utterly irresponsible as he was brilliant.

* * * * *

Laston Meunier dug up poor old Fritz Von Hammer, the former Eos pianist--whose breath was still as fetid as ever ... who still insisted on seizing you by the coat lapel and talking right into your nose--dug him up from the moving picture house, where he played.

Von Hammer wept over the piano, as he found himself free again to play as he wished....

The party was in my honour. There were present about a dozen guests, picked from Buffalo's bohemia. They sat about on the floor on cushions.

Swartzman recited Poe's Black Cat, with gestures and facial contortions that were terrifying. His huge, yellow, angular Japanese face grimacing near the ceiling ... he was six foot six, if anything....

His recitation was done so well that, when he had finished, we sat, for a moment, in frightened silence, like children. Then we stormed him with applause.

"Now play the Danse Macabre," cried Nichi, to Von Hammer....

"I can't do it without a violin accompaniment."

"Try it for me ... and I shall dance the Dance of Death for you."

Von Hammer said he would do his best ... after much persuasion and a few more drinks....

And Nichi Swartzman danced....

We saw, though we did not know it, the origin of modern futurist dancing there. Nichi danced with his street clothes on ... wearing his hat, in ghoulish rakishness, tipped down over his eyes ... inter-wreathing his cane with his long, skeletal, twisting legs and arms ... his eyes gleaming cat-like through merest slits....

At three o'clock in the morning we were all drunk. Before we parted we joined in singing shakily but enthusiastically _Down in Bohemia Land_.

* * * * *

Meunier, fulfilling his promise to me, paid my fare to New York. I soon walked into the office of the _National Magazine_.

Clara Martin was there, and Allsworth Lephil, the managing editor, and his assistant Galusha Siddon.

As I sat in the office, they gave me a sort of impromptu reception.

Ray Sanford strolled in, as fresh-complexioned as an Englishman. He was, they said, preparing a series of articles on the negro problem. And I met a little, bustling, sharp-eyed man, with much of the feminine about him,--his face lifted as if on an intuitive intellectual scent.... Carruthers Heflin ... he wore a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, like a stage-doctor. He was busy with a series of articles to be entitled, _Babylons of To-day_ ... exposing the corruption of our modern American cities.

I spoke to them of my projected trip to Europe.

"I think you're foolish to run off to Europe just at this time in your life. Now is the time you should establish yourself here. Besides, Jarvis Mackworth has written us that you're writing a book while Derek, the Chicago millionaire, stakes you."

"Yes, that's true. But couldn't I write it in Europe as well as here?"

"You'd find too many distractions."

"Where would you go first?" asked Clara Martin.

"Paris!"

"That would be absolutely fatal for a young man of your disposition. You need to sit quiet and write for a few years ... you've been over the map too much already."

"Baxter has just been in here ... he's writing us a sensational novel exposing society. He spoke to me about you," Lephil remarked,--"said he wished we'd put a tag on you and ship you down to his Eden colony."

There was a pause. Miss Martin thoughtfully tapped her forehead with a pencil.

"I don't think it would be good for Johnnie to go down to Eden and put up with Penton," she interjected, "they're too much alike."

"Ally Merton is in New York," Galusha Siddon informed me. "He's working on the _Express_. He wants you to run down and see him."

* * * * *

Merton had come to New York the year before, to work on the _Express_. Mackworth had gotten him the job. Ally was as meticulously dressed as ever. His eyes swept me from head to foot, with an instinctive glance of appraisal, as he shook hands.

"Come on up on the roof. The paper wants a photo of you ... to go with a story I'm writing about you."

* * * * *

I rather resented all my friends' way of talking to me, as if I were a child to be discussed, ordered about, and disposed of. But I humoured them by playing up to their patronising spirit ... even playing horse with them continually on the sly, and having lots of fun that they didn't suspect.

* * * * *

The next morning I was in the office of the _Independent_, visiting with the literary editor, good old Dr. William Hayes Ward. He was a man of eighty years ... a scholar in English and the Greek and Latin classics....

Once, when on a vacation he had written me that, as pastime, he had read the whole of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ over again. In the Greek, of course.

His abused eyes floated uneasily behind a double pair of lenses ... a dissenting minister ... of the old school ... he seemed to me far more youthful, more invigorating, than any of my other more youthful friends in the literary and magazine world.

We talked and talked of poetry. He brought down a huge treatise on English versification, translated from some German scholar's life-research--to prove a point ... he discussed what Sidney Lanier--whom he had known--might have done with metrics, had he only lived longer....

And "no ... no ... take my advice," he said, "don't go down to Eden." There was something so vaguely deprecatory in his voice that it brought from me the question--"why not? isn't Penton Baxter all right?"

"Oh, yes," in the same deprecatory tone,--"he's all right enough, alone--but, together, you'd be like two balloons without ballast. He might get you, or you might get him, into some sort of mess."

"Why Dr. Ward, what do you mean?"

"Penton is always protesting about something or other,--always starting fantastic schemes ... he's just finished with his Parnassus Palace experiment, which brought him a lot of newspaper notoriety ... which is to me distasteful, extremely distasteful ... yet Baxter," he added hastily, "is a real force ... he can think of more original projects in a given space of time than anyone else I know."

"I look on him as a great and wonderful man!"

"Mark my word, Mr. Gregory, you'll find yourself in some sort of mix-up if you go down to Eden to live with him. You're both too mad and inflammable to be in the same neighbourhood."

Using all his powers of persuasion, Dr. William Hayes Ward tried to explain to me how I owed it both to Mr. Derek and Mr. Mackworth to finish my play.

"Have you no place else to go to, beside Eden?"

"I could run out to Perfection City--and camp out there."

"Now that's a good idea ... why not try that?"

* * * * *

"Johnnie, had your lunch yet?" it was Dr. Percival Hammond, the managing editor, who was asking, leaning out from his cubbyhole where he sat before his desk.

"No, sir!"

"Come and share mine!"

I said good-bye to Dr. Ward and walked down the corridor to where Hammond sat. He looked more the fashionable club man than ever, though he did have a slight sprinkling of dandruff on his coat collar. I was quick to notice this, as I had been quick to notice Miss Martin's few, close-scizzored hairs on her fine, thinking face.

Lunch!

But I was not to be taken out to a meal in a restaurant, as anyone might expect, but Hammond sat me down on a chair by his side, and he handed me a glass of buttermilk and a few compressed oatmeal cakes.

* * * * *

I had stayed over night at the Phi-Mu House, at Columbia, with Ally. I had stayed up nearly all night, rather, arguing, in behalf of extreme socialism, with the boys ... till people, hearing our voices through the open windows, had actually gathered in the street without.

"You're utterly mad, but we like you!" said one of the boys.

In the morning, before I clutched my suitcase in my hand and started for Perfection City, Ally showed me something that had come in the morning mail, which startled me. It was a clipping from the Laurel _Globe_--a vilely slanderous article, headed, "Good Riddance."...

And first it lied that I had run away from my "confederates" of the Scoop Club, leaving them to bear the onus of the investigation of the town's morals ... which was, of course, not true ... I had made a special point of going to the sheriff and asking him if I would be needed. If so, I would defer my trip East. And he had replied that it would be all right for me to go....

But the second count--the personal part of the story, was more atrocious ... it intimated that I had, during my sojourn at Laurel, been an undesirable that would have made Villon pale with envy ... an habitue of the Bottoms ... that I had been sleeping with negro women and rolling about with their men, drunk.

I was so furious at this that I dropped my suitcase, clenched my hands, and swore that I was straightway going to freight it back and knock all his teeth down "Senator's" Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!

* * * * *

Once more Baxter wrote me, urging me to come to Eden. He told me his wife would welcome me ... and jested clumsily that his secretary would be just the girl to marry me and take care of me....

Jested? I did not know the man yet ... he meant it.

* * * * *

Though I was possessed of a curious premonitory warning that I must not accept his invitation and was, besides, settled in a hut by the lake shore, yet I was tempted to go to Eden....

For one thing, Perfection City was no longer the place of ideals it had been ... it was now a locality where the poorer bourgeoisie sent their wives and children, for an inexpensive summer outing....

Wavering this way and that, I sent a telegram which clinched the matter.

"Will leave for Eden to-morrow morning. John Gregory."

* * * * *

Not far from the little suburban station to which I had changed, lay the Single Tax Colony of Eden. When I dropped off the train and found no one to greet me, I was slightly piqued. Of a labourer in a nearby field I inquired the way to Eden. He straightened his back, paused in his work.

He gave me the direction--"and there by the roadside you'll find a sort of wooden archway with a sign over it ... you step in and follow the path, and that will take you right into the centre of the community. But what do want to go to Eden for? they're all a bunch of nuts there!"

"Maybe I might be a nut, too!"

The old man laughed.

"Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny."

Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly with manuscripts....

A woodland path led me into what seemed, and was, a veritable forest; boughs interlaced above, with glimpses of blue sky between. In interspaces of trees wild flowers grew. Luxuriant summer was abroad.

I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community. It was in a beautiful open space like a natural meadow.

There stood the houses of the colonists--Single Taxers, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists,--folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back again to pastoral simplicity.

It was a community such as William Morris or some Guild Socialist of a medieval turn of mind might have conceived. It was the Dream of John Ball visualised.

"When Adam dolve and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?"

Toy houses picturesquely set under trees that fringed the Common ... houses with different, quaint colours ... the "green" in the centre carefully cropped as if nibbled by sheep ... well-kept paths of parti-coloured stone, as if each pebble had been placed there by hand....

Everything here was born obviously of the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement which seeks to teach that each shall make and build for himself ... if clumsily, yet uniquely ... the product to be something at least individual and warm from the maker's personality.

I thought of Jusserand's _English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages_. If the Canterbury Pilgrims, led by jolly Harry Bailey, their host, had burst out from the woods, on horseback, singing and jesting, I should not have considered their appearance an anachronism....

A tousle-headed girl-child in rompers which she was too big for, pointed me Baxter's house, the largest in the community.

There seemed to be no one home when I dropped my suitcase on the front porch....

I knocked vigorously. No one came. I waited a long while.

"A hell of a way to welcome me!" I meditated, my egotism hurt.

Again I knocked.

"Come in! do come in!" a gentle voice bade--it was Mrs. Baxter's.

I pushed the door open and stepped in. I set down my heavy suitcase with a thump, on the bare, hardwood floor of the large room in which I found myself--a room sparsely furnished, its walls lined with books. It had one large window, under and along which was built in, a long, wide shelf made into a sort of divan, promiscuous with cushions.

Propped up with a disordered heap of these cushions sat Mrs. Hildreth Baxter, in blouse and bloomers; she was reading.

"Why, Johnnie Gregory!" she cried, swinging her graceful, slim legs down, and rising, coming toward me, extending her hand in greeting....

"Why, Johnnie Gregory--YOU here!"

"Yes, didn't you!--"

"I _knew_ I was right ... Penton maintained it was to-morrow you were due--Darrie sided with him--Darrie is a friend of mine who is visiting us, from Virginia--but Ruth, Mubby's secretary," she finished, relapsing into her intimate petting name for her husband, (Mubby is short for "My hubby")--"Ruth sided with me, though we had quite an argument about it."

"And you and Ruth were right!"

"Yes, I was right," she assented, leaving "Ruth" out, with naive egoism.

"Sit down in the morris chair ... you look dusty and heated ... I'll entertain you ... I'm all alone ... Penton is dictating an article to Ruth. Darrie's washing her hair. I'm the only member of the Leisure Class. I'm lazing here, reading Gorky's latest novel."

What an engaging, pretty, naive, little woman this was! I commented inwardly. A sweet aroma of feminine health breathed from her body, bosom, hair--a tumbly black mass--as perfume breathes from a wild flower.

Strangely enough, I felt calm and happy in her presence; at home, as I had never been with any woman or girl before.

Up to this moment, when alone with a woman, timidity had touched me to ice, while inwardly I had trembled with suppressed passion and fright.

Set in the midst of a group of women, I shone. As at the university, when I used to visit whole sorority chapters at once, and, with from five to ten girls seated about me in the parlour, talk brilliantly and easily and poetically with all of them. Left alone with any _one_, my mouth dried like sand, my tongue clove to my palate, I shook all over as with a palsy.

With Hildreth Baxter I was straightway, marvellously, at my ease. We talked of Keats--she seemed to know all of his verse by heart....

Shelley--she quoted his less-known fragments....

"O WORLD! O LIFE! O TIME!--"

"O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more--Oh, never more!

"Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and the winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more--Oh, never more!"

"Surely that does not express your feelings--and you still a young and beautiful woman?"

"No, but I am profoundly moved by the sad beauty of it; and by the fact that perhaps Poe got his refrain of 'nevermore' for his _Raven_ as a reminiscence from it."

She laughed engagingly with feminine inconsequence and stooped down to recover a slight, silver bracelet that had slipped off over one of her small hands. I caught a brief glimpse of the white division of her breasts as she stooped over. The vision stabbed my heart with keen enjoyment that pained....

Already we were caught up in a current of mysterious fellow-feeling that was soon to bear us onward to the full ocean of frank love and passion. Though at this time neither she nor I perceived it.

* * * * *

Penton came in ... the little, handsome, red-faced man, with his Napoleonic head too large for his small, stocky body ... his large, luminous eyes like those of the Italian fisher boy in the painting ... his mouth a little too large ... his chin a trifle too heavy-jowled. His hands were feminine ... but his feet were encased in heavy shoes that made them seem the feet of a six-foot day labourer....

Ruth, his secretary, coming close behind him,--was tall, not ungraceful in an easy, almost mannish way ... slab-figured ... built more like a boy than a young woman dangerously near the old maid. She too wore bloomers. Her face was tanned. It was too broad and placid for either prettiness or beauty, but a mischievous tilt to the nose and large calm hazel eyes kept her this side of mere plainness....

Penton glanced from me to his wife, from his wife to me, in one look of instinctive inquiry, before he addressed me....

"Well, Johnnie, here you are ... East at last ... and about to become a real literary man."

"He's been here a full hour ... we didn't want to interrupt you--" his wife explained.

"Your work is too important for the world"--I began sincerely and reverently.

Baxter beamed. His being expanded under my worship.

He caught both my hands, friendlily, in his.

"Welcome to Eden," then, introducing, "this is my secretary, Miss Ruth Hazlitt; she's been quite keen to meet you ... we've talked of you a lot ... she knows your poetry and thinks you're a genius, and will some day be recognised as a great poet."

Ruth Hazlitt nodded, shy, took my hand in introduction.

"Darrie, oh, Dar-_rie_!" called Baxter ... "a Southern society girl, but a mighty good radical already," he explained to me, _sotto voce_, as we heard sounds of her approach.

Mary Darfield Malcolm came in, in a flimsy dressing gown of yellow, with blue ribbons in it, her hair wet and still done up in a towel. Superbly she trusted to her big eyes of limpid brown, and to the marble-like pallour of her complexion, the twin laughing dimples in her cheeks ... she added her welcome to the others ... easily, with a Southern way of speech that caught each recalcitrant word by the tail and caressed its back as it came out....

* * * * *

That afternoon, at Baxter's suggestion, he and I launched forth on a walk together....

"There is some beautiful country for walking about here."

* * * * *

"Darrie, will you and Ruth have the veal steak cooked by six o'clock?"

I noticed that he did not include his wife. Also, I looked at him in amazement ... a look the significance of which he instantly caught ... Steak? Meat?

"I've done a lot of experimenting in dietetics," he explained, "and I have finally been brought to face the fact, after years of vegetarianism, that there's nothing like a good steak for a brain-worker. It's easily digested and affords ready nourishment ... vegetables, yes ... but it takes up so much vital energy to digest them ... the meat-eating races are the dominant races of the world ... but," he flashed quickly, "I always try to be logical and consistent. If I eat meat, I must be willing to kill the animal I eat. I must not stand off in dainty horror over the butcher's trade, while I live by it."

"Surely you don't mean that you do your own butchering?"

"No ... not that ... but I've proven to myself that I can kill ... we had a dog, a mongrel, that attached itself to us ... tore up everything in my study ... tore the sheets and pillow slips on the beds ... I took it out into the woods," he ended gravely, "and killed ... shot it ... of course I had to summon up all my resolution ... but I did it."

While admitting the almost childlike exactness of my friend's logic, I could not help smiling to myself at his grotesque sincerity....

We walked far ... through green fields ... over flashing brooks ... through lovely woodland vistas ... we paused on the top of a hill, with vistas all about us ... just as we had done on Azure Mound in Kansas....

"I asked you to take this walk with me in order to tell you something.... Johnnie, you're my friend, and that is why I don't want you to stay at my house with us. I want you to put up at the Community Inn, at my expense ... eat your meals with us, of course."

I was surprised. He did not want me in the house _because I was his friend_!... in silence I waited his further explanation....

"Yes," he continued, "I want to spare you trouble ... Hildreth and I, you see," he proceeded with painful frankness, "are quite near the breaking point ... I don't think we'll be together very many months longer ... and ... and ... I don't want you to become involved ... for I'm simply desperate."

"But, Penton, how could I become involved?"

"Johnnie, you don't know women, or you wouldn't ask ... especially women of my wife's type ... hysterical, parasitic, passionate, desperate.... I tell you what, you stay at the inn!"

A pause;--I was startled by what he said next:

"Besides, it's time you had a mate, a real mate ... and I," he proceeded with incredible gravity, "I have been urging Ruth, my secretary, to take you ... you and she would be quite happy together ... she can support herself, for instance ... that would place no economic burden on you."

"Really, Penton!" I demurred.

I was learning how utterly bookish, how sheerly a literary man Penton Baxter was ... and how absurd, at the same time. How life never drew near him, how he ever saw it through the film of his latest theory, and tried to order his own, as well as everybody else's life, to jibe with it....

* * * * *

"Penton, it is a matter of indifference to me where I put up. It was you who invited me to come to Eden ... but I won't mind staying at Community Inn, as I can only be with you for a couple of weeks, anyhow ... I'm due to take a cattleboat for Paris, for Europe, as soon as I have _Judas_ finished."

* * * * *

Supper ... veal steaks served on a plain board table outside the big house, under a tree. We waited on ourselves. We discussed Strindberg, his novels and plays ... his curious researches in science ... Nietzsche....

Afterward, having eaten off wooden plates, we flung the plates in the fireplace, burning them ... Ruth washed the knives, forks, spoons....

"It's such a saving of effort to use wooden plates and paper napkins ... so much less mere household drudgery ... so much more time for living saved."

I had taken my suitcase and was about to repair to the much-discussed inn. But Penton asked me to wait, while he had a conference with the three women of the household.

Soon he came out, smiling placidly and blandly.

"Johnnie, I'm sorry about this afternoon ... I've been rather hasty, rather inhospitable ... you are not to go to the inn, but stay with us. The girls have persuaded me ... the tent, down beside the little house, is yours all summer, if you like."

* * * * *

I found the tent in a clump of trees ... it had a hard board floor, a wash-stand, table, chair, and cot.

Along with the rest of the household, I retired early ... but not to sleep.

I lit my big kerosene lamp and sat propped up with the pillows, reading, till late, the poetry of Norah May French, the beautiful, red-headed girl who had, like myself, also lived in Eos, where Roderick Spalton's Artworks were....

She had been, Penton informed me, when he handed me her book, one of the famous Bohemians of the San Francisco and Carmel art and literary crowd....

After a brief career of adventurous poverty, she had committed suicide over a love affair.

Her poetry was full of beauty and spontaneity ... a grey mist dancing full of rainbows, like those you see at the foot of Niagara....

I must have read myself to sleep, for the lamp was still lit when I woke up early with the dawn ... it was the singing of the birds that woke me on my second day at Eden....

Working on farms, in factories, on ships at sea, being up at all hours to catch freights out of town had instilled in me the habit of early rising; I would have risen at dawn anyhow without the birds to wake me.

Turning over for my pencil, which I ever keep, together with a writing pad, at my bedside, to catch the fleeting poetic inspiration, I indited a sonnet to Baxter (all copies of which I have unfortunately lost or I would give it here) in which I sang his praises as a great man of the same rank as Rousseau and Shelley.

In spite of the fact that I was fully aware of all his absurdities and peccadilloes, the true greatness of the man remained, and still remains, undimmed in my mind.

* * * * *

High day. I walked along the path, past the little house where Baxter sequestered himself when he wished to be alone to think or write; it was close to my tent, around a corner of trees. I tiptoed religiously by it, went on up to the big house where the three women slept, as if drawn to their abode by a sort of heliotropism.

The whole house stood in quiet, the embodiment of slumber.

* * * * *

A lank, flat-chested woman came up the path from the opposite direction ... dressed drab in one long, undistinguished gown like a Hicksite or Quaker, without the hood ... her head was bare ... her fine, brown hair plaited flat.

"Good morning!"

"Good morning," she replied, a query in her voice.

"I am John Gregory, the poet," I explained. "I arrived yesterday on a visit to the Baxters."

She said she had heard of me ... she opened the door and went into the house. I followed.

She was the wife of Anarchist Jones, of whom I had already heard the household speak--as a difficult, recalcitrant member of the colony.

The Joneses were very poor. They had two children and lived in a mere shack on the outskirts of the community. Jones was a shoemaker. His wife came twice a week to clean up and set things to rights in the Baxter menage--his two houses. I took care of the tent myself, while I was there....

By this time Darrie, Ruth, and Mrs. Baxter were up. I sat in the library, in the morris chair, deeply immersed in the life of Nietzsche, by his sister. Nevertheless I was not so preoccupied as not to catch fugitive glimpses of kimonos disappearing around door-corners ... women at their mysterious morning ritual of preparing themselves against the day.

Comfortable of mind, at ease in heart and body, I sat there, dangling one leg over the arm of the chair. I was much at home in the midst of this easy, disjointed family group.

* * * * *

We were, the four of us--Darrie, Hildreth, Ruth, and I--seated together at our outdoor table, scooping out soft-boiled eggs.

Hildreth Baxter had boiled my two eggs medium for me ... to the humorous, affected consternation of Darrie and Ruth, which they, of course, deliberately made visible to me, with the implication--

"You'd best look out, when Penton's lazy little wife waits on you ... she is the one who generally demands to be waited on, and if--"

* * * * *

And now, for the moment, all of us were combined against the master of the house ... furtively and jocularly combined, like naughty children....

Hildreth smuggled forth her coffee percolator, which she kept hidden from her husband's search ... and we soon, by the aid of an alcohol stove, had a cup of fragrant coffee a-piece ... which Darrie made....

"Penton swears coffee is worse than whiskey, the rankest of poisons. We have to hide the percolator from him."

"He lies a-bed late, when he wakes. He lies there thinking out what he will later on dictate to Ruth.... we can finish before--"

But just then Penton himself came hurrying up the path from the little cottage.

When he saw what we were doing he gave us such a look of solemn disgust that we nearly smothered with laughter, which we tried to suppress.

"When you take that percolator off the table--" he stood aloof, "I'll sit down with you."

Then we laughed outright, not in disrespect of him, but as children laugh at a humorous incident at school.

"Oh, yes, it might seem funny ... so does a drunken man who gives up his reason to a drug seem funny.... but it's no more a joke than that ... coffee is a vile poison ... I have a sense of humour," he continued, turning to me, "just as keen as the next one ... but I know, by scientific research, just how much damage that stuff does."

* * * * *

I read my sonnet to Penton, in a grave, respectful voice.

Peace was patched. We then sat together, under the chequered shade of the big tree which towered over our table ... Baxter waxed as eloquent as an angel ... the wonderful, absurd, little man.

Daniel came romping out for breakfast.

* * * * *

Penton reached for the morning's mail. He climbed into the hammock and read, with all the joy of a boy, the huge bunch of press clippings about himself, his activities, his work ... a daily procedure of his, I was to learn. He chuckled, joked, was immensely pleased ... handed me various items to read, or read choice bits aloud to all of us.

After all, though I pretended to criticise, to myself ... yet, in my heart, I liked his frank rejoicing in his fame, his notoriety, and only envied him his ability to do so.

* * * * *

I returned to my tent to work, as I had planned to do each morning, on my play _Judas_. The dialogue would not come to me ... I laid it aside and instead was inspired to set down instantly the blank verse poem to the play:--

"A noise of archery and wielded swords
All night rang through his dreams. When risen morn
Let down her rosy feet on Galilee
Blue-vistaed, on the house-top Judas woke:
Desire of battle brooded in his breast
Although the day was hung with sapphire peace,
And to his inner eye battalions bright
Of seraphim, fledged with celestial mail,
Came marching up the wide-flung ways of dawn
To usher in the triumph-day of Christ....
But sun on sun departed, moon on moon,
And still the Master lingered by the way,
Iscariot deemed, dusked in mortality
And darkened in the God by flesh of man.
For Judas a material kingdom saw
And not a realm of immaterial gold,
A city of renewed Jerusalem
And not that New Jerusalem, diamond-paved
With love and sapphire-walled with brotherhood,
Which He, the Master, wrestled to make plain
With thews of parable and simile--
So ''tis the flesh that clogs him,' Judas thought
(A simple, earnest man, he loved him well
And slew him with great friendship in the end);
'Yea, if he chose to say the word of power,
The seraphim and cherubim, invoked,
Would wheel in dazzling squadrons down the sky
And for the hosts of Israel move in war
As in those holy battles waged of yore'....

* * * * *

"Ah, all the world now knows Gethsemane,
But few the love of that betraying kiss!"

* * * * *

I did not have to be very long at Eden to learn that the community was divided into two parties: the more conservative, rooted element whom success was making more and more conservative,--and the genuinely radical crowd. The anarchist, Jones, led the latter group, a very small one.

As far as I could see, this anarchist-shoemaker held the right. On my third day in Eden my interest in the community life about me led me to inquire my way to the place where Jones lived ... a shack built practically in its entirety of old dry goods boxes ... a two-room affair with a sort of enlarged dog-kennel adjunct that stood out nearer the road--Jones's workshop.

The man looked like the philosopher he was--the anarchist-philosopher, as the newspapers were to dub him ... as he sat there before his last, hammering away at the shoe he was heeling, not stopping the motions of his hands, while he put that pair aside, to sew at another pair, while he discoursed at large with me over men and affairs.

"What is all this trouble I'm hearing about?" I asked him.

"Trouble?--same old thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started, this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head, worsened him, since,--as it has done with many a good man before. Now he goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or anything else that he knows nothing about....

"But it isn't that that I object to ... it is that he's allowing the original object of this colony, and of the Single Tax Idea, to become gradually perverted here. We're becoming nothing but a summer resort for the aesthetic quasi-respectables ... these folk are squeezing us poor, honest radicals out, by making the leases prohibitive in price and condition."

He stopped speaking, while he picked up another pair of shoes, examined them, chose one, and began sewing a patch on it....

He rose, with his leathern apron on, and saw me out....

"--glad you came to see old Jones ... you'll see and hear a lot more of me, the next week or so!" and he smiled genially, prophetically.

He looked like Socrates as he stood there ... jovially homely, round-faced ... head as bald as ivory ... red, bushy eyebrows that were so heavy he shrugged them....

"I'm just beginning the fight (would you actually believe it) for free speech here ... it takes a radical community, you know, to teach the conservatives how to suppress freedom....

"You must come around to the big barn Friday night, after the circus."

"--the circus?"

"Oh, we have a circus of our own every summer about this time ... we represent the animals ourselves ... some of us don't need to make up much, neither, if we only knew it," he roared.

"After the imitation circus, the real circus will begin. I have compelled the announcement of a general meeting to discuss my grievances, and that of others, who are not game enough to speak for themselves."

* * * * *

I found nobody but Hildreth--Mrs. Baxter--at home, when I returned. She was lying back in the hammock where Penton lounged to read his news clippings ... near the outdoor table ... dressed easily in her bloomers and white middy blouse with the blue bow tie ... her great, brown eyes, with big jet lashes, drooping langourously over her healthy, rounded cheeks ... her head of rich, dark hair touseled attractively. She was reading a book. I caught the white gleam of one of her pretty legs where the elastic on one side of her bloomers had slipped up.

Alone with her, a touch of my old almost paralytic shyness returned ... but the pathway to my tent lay so near her hammock I would almost brush against its side in passing....

She looked up. She gazed at me indefinitely, as if coming back from a far dream to reality.

"Oh, Johnnie Gregory! You?" fingering her hair with flexible fingers like a violinist trying his instrument.

"Yes!" I stopped abruptly and flushed.

"Did Jones like you?"

"I think he did."

"Jones is an eccentric ... but nine-tenths of the time he is right in his contentions ... his moral indignations ... it is his spirit of no compromise that defeats him."

With that she reached out one hand to me, with that pretty droop of the left corner of her mouth, that already had begun to fascinate me....

"Help me up ... a hammock's a nice place to be in, but an awkward thing to get out of."

I took her hand and helped her rise to a sitting posture.

"Ruth's in the little house typing ... Penton and Darrie are a-field taking a walk."

I paused where I was. Mrs. Baxter stood directly in the pathway that led to my tent. And the second act of _Judas_ had begun to burn in my brain, during my vigorous walk back from Jones's shack....

* * * * *

"In the yard of an inn at Capernaum. On the left stands the entrance to the inn. In the extreme background lies the beach, and, beyond, the Sea of Galilee. A fisherboat is seen, drawn up on shore. Three fishermen discovered mending nets, at rise of curtain."

The stage was set for the second act. I must get the play finished in the rough. I owed this much to Mr. Derek, who was faithfully backing me--if not to my own career ... and already I had succeeded in interesting Mitchell Kennerley, the new young publisher, in my effort. After the book was disposed of ... then Europe ... then London ... then Paris, and all the large life of the brilliant world of intellect and literature that awaited me.

But, at the present, one small, dainty, dark woman unconsciously stood in my pathway. I looked into Hildreth Baxter's face with caution, strangely disquieted, but proud to be outwardly self-possessed.

"Let's _us_ take a walk," she suggested.

"No, I must go to my tent and write!"

"Oh, come now ... don't you be like Mubby!... that's the way _he_ talks."

"All right," I assented, amazed at her directness, "I'll put my work by for the day--though the entire dialogue of the three Galilean fishermen about the miracle of the great draught of fishes is at this very moment burning in my brain."

She laid her hand lightly, but with an electric contact, on the bend of my arm, and off we started, into the inviting fields.

Not far out, we came across a group of romping children. They were shouting and chasing one another about, as happy dogs do when overjoyed with excessive energy.

The example the children set was contagious.... Hildreth and I were soon romping too--when out of the former's sight. We took hands and ran hard down a hill, and half-way up another one opposite, through our own natural impetus.

We changed our mood, strolling slowly and thoughtfully till we came to a small rustic bridge, so pretty it seemed almost like stagecraft, that spanned, at one leap, one of the countryside's innumerable, flashing brooks. We stood looking over into the foaming, speeding water.

"There's one thing sure about Eden ... in spite of the squabbles and disagreements of the elders, the place is a children's paradise."

"That's only because they have all nature for their backyard--no thanks to their elders," Hildreth answered, looking up into my face with a quick smile, "the grown-ups find misery wherever, they go."

"Does that mean that you are unhappy?"

"I suppose I should say 'no.'"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Neither do I, then."

Again that sweet, tantalizing, enigmatic droop of her mouth's corner.

We strolled further ... into the fields again ... with linked comradely hands. It seemed that she and I had been born brother and sister in some impossible pastoral idyll.

* * * * *

A change in our spirit again. A fresh desire to romp.

"Let's play just as if we were children, too."

"Tag! You're _it_!" and I touched her arm and ran. She ran after me in that curious loping fashion peculiar to women. I turned and wound like a hare. She stopped, breathless. "That's no fair!" she cried, "you're running too fast."

"Well, then, I'll almost stand still, then see if you can catch me!"

She made at me, shouting, her face flushed with the exercise. I ducked and swerved and doubled.

"You're quite quick and strong," she exclaimed, admiringly, as I caught her by the shoulders.

I stooped over, hunching my back.

"Come on, play leap-frog," I invited. She hesitated, gave a run at me, put both hands on my back, but caught her left leg on my neck. We collapsed in a laughing heap, she on top of me.

Slowly we disentangled ourselves. I reached a hand and helped her up.

"I'm no good at that, either ... let's stop playing ... I'm tired."

We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog out hunting on his own. He looked back twice as he went.

"--wonder if he saw us?"

"--perhaps--but what matter if he did?"

"Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an undercurrent of gossip runs in this place."

We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.

We sat quite apart, at first. Then our hands met in instinctive fondness ... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.

"You're like a small boy, Johnnie."

"And you haven't acted so very much like a grown woman, have you, Hildreth?" It was the first time I had called her by her first name.

"Can you, or anyone else, tell me just how grown women do act? I myself don't know, yet I'm a woman."

I drew closer to her as if drawn by some attractive power. A stray wisp of her hair lit across my cheek stingingly. Then the wind blew a perfumed strand of it across my lips and over my nostrils.

It made me rub my lips, it tickled so. Hildreth noticed it.

"Wait," she bade playfully, "I'll bet I can make you rub your lips again."

"No, you can't."

"Hold still!" she leaned toward me; I could look down into her bosom. She just touched my lips with her forefinger.

"Now!" she exclaimed triumphantly.

"--think you've tickled me, do you?"

"--just wait!"

I forgot myself. My lips tickled and I rubbed them with the length of a finger ... Hildreth laughed....

"Hildreth!"

I leaned toward my friend's wife, calling her again by her first name.

I lay in a half-reclining posture, my head almost against her hip. I was looking up into her face. She glanced down at me with a quick start at the tone of my voice. She looked gravely for a moment into my face. I observed an enigmatic something deep in her eyes ... which sank slowly back as the image of a face does, in water,--as the face itself is withdrawn. She moved apart a little, with a motion of slow deliberation.

"Hildreth!" I heard myself calling again, with a deep voice, a voice that sounded alien in my own ears....

"Come, boy!" and she pulled back her hand from my grasp, and catching mine in hers a moment, patted the back of it lightly--"come, don't let's be foolish ... we've had such a happy afternoon together, don't let's spoil it ... now let's start home."

As soon as I was on my feet and away from her, she became playful again. She reached up her hand for me.

"Help me up!"

I brought her to her feet with a strong, quick pull, and against my breast. But I did not dare do what I desired--take her in my arms and try to kiss her. She paused a second, then thrust me back.

"Look, the sun's almost gone down ... and Mubby and Darrie will be home a long time by this time ... and Mubby will be getting fidgety."

The sun's last huge shoulder of red was hulking like a spy behind a distant, bare knoll ... separate blades of grass stood up in microscopic yet giant distinctness, against its crimson background.

Our walk home was a silent, passively happy one that went without incident....

* * * * *

Penton and Darrie were indeed home before us.

"Where have you two been all this time," Penton asked, a slight touch of querulousness in his voice.

"Oh, Johnnie and I have been out for a walk, too!" replied Hildreth in an even voice.

* * * * *

At lunch, the next day,--a day when Penton was called in to Philadelphia on business--while Darrie, Ruth, Hildreth and I sat talking together peacefully about our outdoor board, Hildreth suddenly threw a third of a glass of milk on Darrie's shirt-waist front.

We were astounded.

"Why, Hildreth, what does this mean?" I asked.

"I won't stop to explain," she said, "but from now on I won't stay in the same house with her ... I'm going to move this afternoon, down to Penton's house" (meaning the little cottage but a few steps from my tent).... Ruth rose to intercede ... "Don't Ruth, don't! I want to be let alone." And Hildreth hurried away.

"What in the world could be the matter with Hildreth?" I asked of Ruth. Darrie had also departed, to the big house, to rub her blouse quickly, so that no stain would remain.

"Hildreth's capricious," answered Ruth, "but the plain explanation is downright jealousy."

"Jealousy?"

"Yes ... even though Hildreth no longer loves Penton, she's jealous of him ... the fact is, Hildreth doesn't know what she wants."

"But Darrie--Darrie is her friend?"

"Of course ... and remains her friend. Darrie doesn't want Penton. She only pities him."

I quoted the line about pity being akin to love ... "they do a lot of strolling together."