Chapter XVII: Part 17

Events trod rapidly on one another's heels. Though Penton had gone on frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work,--chiefly because Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not wanted to accompany them both--yet she and I seized on the precedent Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ... roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each other's arms ... praying with devout lover's prayers that we were as unseen as unseeing....

We were abroad in the fields so much that even Penton himself must notice it....

So we developed the flimsiest of all flimsy pretexts ... pretended to be engrossed, together, in of all things, the study of--toadstools and mushrooms ... taking with us Neltje Blanchan's book on _Mushrooms and Toadstools_, with its beautiful coloured illustrations ... and we did learn a lot about these queer vegetations that grow without the need of chlorophyll ... entering into a world of new colours in the vegetable kingdom ... exquisite pinks and mauves and greys ... blues ... purples ... reds ... russets ... in the darkest spots of the woods we sought and found strange species of these marvellous growths ... that grow more readily in the dark and obscurity, the twilights of nature, than in the open sunlight of green summer days....

* * * * *

Down vistas of forest we often pursued each other ... often got lost so that it took hours for re-orientation ... once, for awhile, to our great fright, we could not re-discover our clothes, that we had lightly tossed aside on the bank of a brook lost and remote,--that had never before laved a human body in its singing recesses of forest foliage ... for I had been playing satyr to her nymph, pursuing her....

* * * * *

And each day saw us a little more reckless, more bold and open in our love, our passion, for each other.

* * * * *

"How handsome love is making you, my Paphnutius!"

I was wearing my bath-robe, had stopped at her cottage a moment, in the morning, where she sat, in an easy chair, reading peacefully ... I was on my way for my morning dip in a nearby brook....

My bath-robe, that made me, somehow, feel so aristocratic, so like a member of the leisure class ... I forgot to tell how I had brought it all the way from Kansas, together with my MSS.

* * * * *

As I swam about in the brook, not over four feet deep, I sang and shouted. I had never been so happy in my life....

I dried myself in the sun, using its morning heat for a towel....

As I sat there on a rock, I heard a crackling of twigs, and Penton thrust his way through the intervening branches to my bare rock and my bare self ... I hastily, I do not know why, put on my bathrobe....

"Hello, Penton."

"Good morning, Johnnie. I felt you'd be down here for your morning bath ... I came to have a serious talk with you."

"Yes?"

"I want you to take calmly what I am about to say!"

Penton was much impressed with my stories of tramp days and tales of adventure on land and sea, which you may be sure my sense of the dramatic had encouraged me to lay on thick--and he, plainly, did not desire any heat in the discussion which was to follow....

"Recently it has come to my attention that there has been a lot of gossip about you and Hildreth ... your conduct together." He drew his lips together tightly, settled himself for a long siege....

"Why, Penton," I began, protestingly and hypocritically,--I had planned far other and franker conduct in such an emergency--but here I was, deprecating the truth--

"Why, Penton, God knows--"

"Never mind ... if it is true, I am very sorry for you--for Hildreth's sake, for yours, for mine ... but I want to warn you, if it is not true, to look out ... you, as a friend, owe me some obligations ... I have taken you in here, accepted you as one almost of my family, and--"

"But, Penton, this is unfair," I lied, "unfair even to suspect me--"

"If it had been anybody but you, Johnnie, I would have been suspicious weeks ago ... Oh, I know, Hildreth ... she is giving all the manifestations ... how her face shines, how beautiful she has grown, as she does, with a new heart interest!... and her taking my little cottage ... ousting me from it....

"If it was anyone else," and he fetched a deep sigh, with tears standing in his eyes, leaving the sentence incomplete.

At that moment I was impelled almost to cast myself at his feet, to confess, and beg forgiveness....

"I want to warn you," he went on, "of Hildreth ... once before this has happened ... she is a varietist by nature, as I am essentially a monogamist."

"--and the free love idea, it was you who taught her this, brought her into contact with Havelock Ellis, Ellen Key, Rosa Von Mayerreder?"

"I deny that. I believe in human freedom ... divorce ... remarriage ... but not in extreme sex-radicalism ... Hildreth has misinterpreted me ... the people you mention are great idealists, but in many ways they go too far ... true--I brought Hildreth into contact with these books; but only that she might use her own judgment, not accept them wholly and blindly, as she has done...."

I looked at the man. He was sincere. An incredible, naive, almost idiotic purity shone in his face....

Again I was impelled to confess. Again I held my tongue. Again I lied.

"Penton, what you have just said about you and Hildreth and your lives together, I shall consider as sacred between us."

He gave me his hand.

"Promise me one thing, that you will not take Hildreth as your sweetheart ... be true to our friendship first, Johnnie."

"Penton, I am only flesh and blood; I will promise, if anything happens, to tell you, ultimately, the truth."

He looked at me with close scrutiny again, at this ambiguous speech.

"Johnnie, _have_ you told me the absolute truth?"

"Yes!" evading his eyes.

"--because there is a wild strain in Hildreth that only needs a little rousing--" He paused.

* * * * *

"Johnnie," as we walked away, "don't you think you had better pack up and leave? _The next time_ I am going to sue for a divorce."

* * * * *

We walked home arm in arm. I simulated so well that it was Baxter who begged pardon for even suspecting me.

But I felt like a dog. I, for my part, determined to bid farewell to Hildreth that very evening, before she retired for the night, in her cottage--take train to New York, and so to Paris, without first finishing my _Judas_, as I had intended.

We would bury forever in the secret places of our hearts what had already happened between us ... this was my first impulse....

My next was--that we should up and run away together, and defy Penton Baxter and the world.

* * * * *

Hildreth could see by the strangeness in my behaviour, as I came into the cottage, to kiss her good-night ... and stay a little while--a new custom of ours, as we grew bolder--could see that I had something on my mind.

I related to her all that had taken place between me and Penton that morning....

"The cad," she cried, "the nasty cad, to talk to you so about me ... I would have told you myself because you are my lover ... but he had no right to tell you ... as far as he has proof positive, you are merely a mutual friend....

"But that's the way with him. He has mixed his own life up so that it is all public, to him.

"Yes," she cried impetuously and passionately ... "it's true ... I have not been faithful to him before...."

"--and you returned to him? wasn't that weak?"

I took her hands in mine, with mind and soul made up at last....

"This time you can go through with it. Here's a man who will stand by you forever. I can earn a living for both of us, and--"

"Don't let's discuss the horrid old subject any more to-night ... I'm tired of discussing ... as you love me, read some poetry to me ... or I shall scream!"

"Have you ever read the sonnets of George Santayana?... I know most of them by heart ... let me quote you his best ...

'O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine!'"

* * * * *

"I wish I had written that!" I said, in a hushed, awed voice, after a moment's silence....

* * * * *

"Now kiss me good-night and go to your tent ... I feel restless, troubled in spirit, to-night," she said, continuing:

"Perhaps I have been too harsh with Penton....

"He is steering on a chartless sea with no compass....

"No wonder he, and all radicals and pioneers in human thought, blunder ridiculously....

"The conservative world has its charts, its course well mapped out....

"I suppose I am not strong enough, big enough, for him."

"Hush! now it is you who're just talking!" I replied.

"You're jealous!"

"By God, yes. I _am_ jealous, though I suppose I ought to be ashamed of it."

* * * * *

She sat in bed, propped up with pillows. She had been reading Shakespeare's sonnets aloud to me. The big green-shaded reading lamp cast a dim light that pervaded the room.

She reached out both arms to me, the wide sleeves falling back from them, and showing their feminine whiteness....

I sat down beside her, caught her to me, kissed her till she was breathless....

"There ... there ... please! _Please!_"

"What! you're not tiring of my kisses?"

"No, dearest boy, but I have a curious feeling, I tell you ... maybe we're being watched...."

"Nonsense ... he believes I told him the truth."

And I caught her in my arms again, half-reclining on the bed.

"Sh!" she flung me off with a sudden impulse of frightened strength, "I hear someone."

"It's only the wind."

"Quick!... my God!"--

* * * * *

I snatched up a volume of Keats. It fell open at "St. Agnes Eve." I hurled myself into a chair ... gathering my breath I began aloud, as naturally as I could--

"St. Agnes' Eve! ah, bitter chill it was;
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold--"

At that very instant, Penton burst in at the door.

He paused a dramatic moment, his back to it, facing us.

I stopped reading, in pretended astonishment.

"Well, Penton?" acted Hildreth languidly....

The look of defeat and bewilderment on the husband's face would have been comic if it had not been pitiable.

I rose, laying the book down carefully.

"I think I'll go now, Hildreth ... you wish to see Penton alone." I put all the calm casual deference in my voice possible. I started to walk easily to the door.

"No! stop! I wish you to stay here, John Gregory ... since you've got yourself into this--"

"I'd like to know what you mean by 'got yourself into this'?"

"Oh, Gregory, let's not talk nonsense any longer."

"You don't believe what I assured you this morning?"

"Johnnie, it's not human ... I can't make myself, and I've tried and tried, God knows!"

"I'd like to know, for my part, just what you mean, Penton Baxter, spying on me this way--bursting in on poor Johnnie Gregory and me like a maniac, while we were only reading poetry together."

"--reading poetry together!" he echoed bitterly, almost collapsing, as he went into a chair.

Again I tried to make my exit.

"Johnnie, I want you to stay. I want to have all this out right here and now," snapped Baxter decisively.

"Very well ... if you put it that way."

"--a nice way to treat your guest," Hildreth interposed, "the way you've been raving about him, too. 'Johnnie Gregory' this, and 'Johnnie Gregory' that!--and the minute he arrives, first you try to make him put up at the community inn; and now you accuse him of--of--"

Hildreth began to weep softly....

And then began a performance at which I stood aside, mentally, in admiration ... the way that little woman handled her husband!

She wept, she laughed, she upbraided, she cajoled ... at one moment swore she wanted nothing better than to die, at the other, vowed eternal fidelity till old age overtook them both....

* * * * *

"I _must_ go," I cried, quite ashamed of myself in my heart. Baxter's credulity had expanded again, in the sun of Hildreth's _forgiveness_ of him for his unjust suspicions!...

For the first time in my life I perceived how a desperate woman can twist a man any way she wants.

"No, you must not go! it is I who am going--to show that I trust you."

"Good God!" I protested--this was too much! "no, no ... good-night, both of you ... good-night, Penton! good-night, Hildreth!"

Penton Baxter stepped in my way, took hold of one of my hands in both of his....

"Please, Johnnie, please, dear friend ... I wish you to stay while I myself go. Finish reading the poem to Hildreth ... I think I have been too harsh in my judgment of both of you ... only please do be more discreet, if only for appearance's sake, in the future....

"Sit down where you were. I wish to show that I trust you both....

"Good-night, Hildreth!" and he kissed his wife in fond contrition.

"Good-night, Johnnie ... forgive me!"

And he wavered out at the door, his face set in pain.

* * * * *

As soon as he had gone I rose swiftly.

"And now I must go."

"If you men aren't the funniest things!" she caught me by the hand, detaining me ... "not yet ... wait a minute. Read more of that poem you began, if only for a blind."

I picked up the book, started reading again ... strangely a rush of tears flooded my eyes and blurred the type....

I began to sob, heart-sick. I did love the absurd little man. My heart ached, broken over my lies....

"Oh! Oh!" I sobbed, "Hildreth, my woman, my sweetheart--he trusted me, Hildreth ... he trusted me!"

I knelt by the bed, thrusting my head into the lap of my First Woman.

She kissed me on top of the head.

"You're both two big, silly babies, that's all you are."

* * * * *

It was dawn when I returned to my tent, pulled the flap aside, fell, exhausted, on my cot in dreamless sleep....

* * * * *

How was it all going to end?

It seemed to me that I had tapped violent, subterranean currents in life and passion, that I had not hitherto known existed....

Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity--these were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination!

The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox, radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman!

* * * * *

Hildreth and I, a-field, had found a bed of that exceptionally poisonous mushroom named _Pallida_ something or other ... the book said its poison was kin to that of the poison in the rattlesnake's bite. My eyes met with Hildreth's ... we needed say no word, both thinking the same thought that frightened us!... "how easy it would be--!"

* * * * *

Now we were plumbing the darker side of passion. Something that Carpenter does not write of in his _Love's Coming of Age_.

* * * * *

A night of wind, shifting into rain. Hildreth I knew would be afraid, alone.

I stepped into her cottage, in my bath-robe. She almost screamed at my sudden appearance. For I came in at the door like a shadow, the wind and rain making such a tumult that a running horse would not have been heard.

"Dearest ... you're all wringing wet ... you're dripping all over the floor. Throw off that robe. Dry yourself--there's a towel there!"

She flung me her kimono. "Here, put this on, till you're comfortable again."

I came out in her kimono, which I was bursting through ... my arms sticking out to my elbow.

She laughed herself almost into hysteria at my funny appearance.

* * * * *

"It will be quite safe to-night. I don't think he'd venture out. This is a hurricane, not a rainstorm ... besides, I believe he's a little afraid of you, Johnnie ... I was watching him rather closely, while I handled him, the other night ... he kept an uneasy eye on you all the time."

"God, but you were superb, Hildreth ... if you could only act that way on the stage!--"

"I _could_ act that way on the stage," she replied unexpectedly, a trifle put out....

Then--

"A woman has to do many things to save herself--"

"Oh, I swear that you are the most marvellous, the most beautiful woman in the world ... I love you ... I adore you ... I'd die for you ... right here ... now!"

* * * * *

As we lay there in the dark the storm pulled and tugged and battered as if with great, sinister hands, striving to get in at us.

Hildreth trembled in my arms, shaking afresh at each shock of the wind and the rain.

"Don't be afraid, my little woman!"

"I wonder if he'd dare come down to-night?"

"If he did, and caught us, I'd kill him."

"He knows that, if he knows anything, I'm sure ... that's why I think we're all right!"

And she came up closer into my arms with a sigh of content.

* * * * *

I had been asleep....

The sudden madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe my memory of former incarnations....

I never had such a vision in my life....

I was fully aware of my surroundings, yet through them shone another, a far reality that belonged to me, too.

I described it to Hildreth, as she lay, thrilled, beside me.

A cave ... high up on the hill-crest ... our cave, that we had imagined, now come true....

I was a huge chap, with a girdle of leaves about my waist ... strange, tropic leaves ... there was black hair all over my body ... there was a little, red fire back in the cave's obscurity....

I had come in, casting a dead fawn down from my shoulder....

Hildreth came forward ... it was plainly she ... though with fine red hair like down on her legs....

"But your name is Naa ... my name is Kaa, the hunter, the slayer of good, red meat."

"Johnnie, do you really see that,--_all_ that!"

She was enthralled like a child, as I described the landscape that lay, spread immense, beneath us ... and the wide ocean, great and blue, that tossed to the east.

Though I was genuinely possessed by this strange vision, though it was no make-believe, I could not help injecting a little Kansas horse-play into it....

I sank my teeth in "Naa's" shoulder, till she cried aloud. I seized her by the hair and dragged her till she lay prone on the floor.

I stood over her, making guttural noises, which I did so realistically that it made shivers run up and down my back while doing it....

I was almost as frightened as she was.

Before I knew it, she was thinking I had suddenly gone mad. She was shouting "Mubby" for help--her husband's pet name....

The little fool! I caught her over the mouth with a grim hand.

"Don't do that ... can't a fellow play once in a while?"

"But it wasn't _all_ play, was it?"

"No, I really saw the cave, and the primeval landscape.

"Shall I tell you some more?"

"No, it frightens me too much ... it seems too real. And you've bruised me, and my head feels as if you've torn half my hair out."

"Why did you call out your husband's pet name?"

"I don't know ... did I?"

"Yes!"

"After a pause in the dark.

"Tell me, was he ... was Mubby.. back there, in our former life?"

"O yes, he was there."

"And Darrie, too?"

"Yes, Darrie, too!"

"If my name was Naa and your name was Kaa, what were their names?"

"Mubby was named Baa and Darrie was Blaa!"

This convulsed Hildreth.

"You great, big, sweet fool of a poet, I do love you, I really do!"

* * * * *

"We were made for each other in every way ... my head just fits your shoulder," she observed quaintly.

* * * * *

"Mubby came down to me this morning," said Hildreth one evening, "and pleaded to be taken back again ... as husband...."

"And what?--"

"What did I do?... when I love you?... the mere idea made me sick to think of. I couldn't endure him again."

* * * * *

One afternoon Penton and Hildreth were closeted together from lunch to dark. It was my turn to cry out in my heart, and suffer agonies of imagination.

* * * * *

The next morning Hildreth began packing up, with the aid of Mrs. Jones. I came upon her, in the library, where I had gone to get a book. My face fell dismally.

"I can't endure it any longer, Johnnie, I'm going back home, to New York ... my father will take me in."

"And how about me?"

"--wait patiently a few days then, if you still feel the same about me, follow me!... and, until you come to join me, write me at least three times a day."

"I'll do it ..." then I couldn't help being playful again, "I'll write you entirely in cave-fashion."

"I am taking a big step, Johnnie, I'm through with Penton Baxter forever--but I wonder if my new life is to be with you ... you are such an irresponsible, delightful madman at times....

"You're wonderful as a lover ... but as a man with a woman to take care of--!"

"Don't worry about that! just give me a chance, and I'll show you I can be practical too."

* * * * *

Hildreth had gone. With her going the bottom seemed to drop out of my existence, leaving a black hole where it had fallen through. I walked about, looking so truly miserable, that even Baxter spoke with gentle consideration to me.

"Poor Johnnie, to think you'd run into a proposition like this, the first pop out of the box."

"No, it isn't what you think ... I'm getting malaria, I believe."

* * * * *

But to be deprived of her, my first love. No longer to be in her presence, no longer to watch her quiet smile, the lovely droop of her mouth's corner ... to feed on the kisses no more that had become as necessary as daily bread itself to me--

I began to lose weight ... to start up in the night, after a brief fit of false slumber, hearing myself, as if it were an alien voice, crying her name aloud....

I whispered and talked tender, whimsical, silly things to my pillow, holding it in my arms, as if it were she....

* * * * *

Each day I sent her four, five letters ... letters full of madness, absurdity, love, despair, wild expressions of intimacy that I would Have died to know anybody else ever saw.

Her first letter in return burned me alive with happiness....

* * * * *

"--you know why she went to the city," Penton teased, "it's because 'Gene Mallows, the California poet, is up there. He and she got on pretty well when we were on the coast."

"You lie!" I bellowed, beside myself, "Hildreth will be faithful to me ... she has promised."

Penton Baxter looked me up and down, courageously, coolly, for a long time. Slowly I realised what I had just said.

"That's all I wanted to know, John Gregory! I've got it out of you at last!"

He turned on his heel.

Changing his mind, he faced me again. This time there was a despairful agony of kindness in his face.

"Dear boy, I'm sorry for all this thing that has come between us. But there is yet time for you to keep out of it. Hildreth and I are done with each other forever ... but you needn't be mixed up in this affair....

"Johnnie, let her stay in New York, and, no matter how much she wants you, don't go up there to join her."

"I love her. I adore her. I want to be where she is. Now the whole truth is out."

"My poor friend!"

"Don't call me your friend--you--"

He tightened his lips....

"If you go up there to join her, remember that I gave you fair warning."

* * * * *

I could endure it no longer, the torment of not seeing her, of not being with her....

As her favourite sonneteer, Santayana, writes--lines she often quoted--

"Love leads me on, no end of love appears.
Is this the heaven, poets, that ye paint?
Oh then, how like damnation to be blessed!"

* * * * *

I informed Ruth, Darrie, Penton that I was going to New York in the morning....

Penton immediately whisked out of my sight, full of uncontrollable emotion....

Darrie and Ruth almost fell upon me, trying to persuade me not to rejoin Hildreth. I evaded by saying that I was now on my way to Europe, that possibly I might see her before I went, but--

* * * * *

I had an hour till train time. My MSS. was packed again, my Josephus, my Homer, my Shakespeare, my Keats, my bath robe.

I thought I would escape without saying good-bye.

But Penton came down the front porch, stood in my path.

"Johnnie, a last warning."

"I want none of your last warnings."

"Are you going to Hildreth?"

"I'm tired of being a liar. I've never lied so much in my life ... yes, I'm going to Hildreth ... and I'm going to persuade her to live with me, and defy the whole damned world--the world of fake radicals that talk about divorces when the shoe pinches them, as well as the world of conservatives," I announced harshly.

"I've done all I could!" he responded wearily, "I see you won't come to your senses--wait a minute!" and he turned on his heel. He had asked me to wait with such solemnity that I stuck still in my tracks, waiting.

He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things, _the coffee percolator_!

"Here!" he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and seriously, "you can take this to your goddess, this poison-machine, and lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is a symbol of her never coming back here again."

Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.

* * * * *

On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I were to effect for the world--a practical example, in our life as we lived it together, of the rightness of free love....

We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the Jersey coast near the sea shore ... autumn was coming on, and there would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the good air.

* * * * *

Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord, over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.

* * * * *

I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fashionably dressed woman. Evidently the mother did not know of the relationship between me and her daughter.

"So you are the poet Hildreth has told me about?" after we had discoursed for upwards of an hour--

"I can easily see how Hildreth has grown so fond of you," and she patted me on the head as if I were a schoolboy, in motherly fashion.

* * * * *

"Mother's rather stupid and old-fashioned ... there'd be no use trying to explain the situation to her. The best thing we can do is to persuade her that Daniel needs her, down in Eden ... that will remove her from the flat, so we can have it all to ourselves for a few days, in order to plan what is to be done next."

Next morning Mrs. Deuell, Hildreth's mother, as innocent as a new-born lamb as to what was up, permitted herself to be shipped off to Eden, to take care of Daniel.

* * * * *

Instead of planning, however, and marshalling our resources, Hildreth and I abandoned ourselves to the mutual happiness and endearments of two love-drunk, emotion-crazed beings on a honeymoon....

* * * * *

The bell rang. In walked Darrie.

"Well, Darrie!" and Hildreth embraced her friend. And I was glad to see her, too. I knew that, in spite of the high pressure we had lived under during the past summer, Darrie was trying hard to be just, to be friend to all of us....

She laughed at the disorder of the place ... dishes unwashed ... food scattered about on the table....

"What a pair of love-birds you two are."

"And has Penton accepted the situation?"

"I came up to tell you that he has ... it has made him quite sick, though!"

"Poor Mubby!" Hildreth ejaculated.

"--but he has sent me to tell you that you can go away together wherever you please, that he won't molest you in the least."

"It's too incredible!" cried Hildreth, almost disappointed, "you don't know him ... he's changed his mind, I am sure, since you left."

"He said he would follow me by Saturday (it was Wednesday) leaving your mother in care of Daniel."

"Does mother suspect?--"

"No ... not at all."

"If the entire world fell about mother's ears, she wouldn't know."

"What do you two lovers purpose doing?"

I unfolded my scheme of living with Hildreth in a Jersey bungalow ... Derek's income to me would go on a while yet ... I could sell stories and poems to the New York magazines ... Hildreth could write a book as well as I ... we would become to the modern world an example of the radical love-life ... the Godwin and Wollstonecraft of the age.

* * * * *

We ate supper together, the three of us, in the flat. It was so cosy. Darrie and Hildreth joined in cleaning the house that afternoon.

But a bomb was to be hurled among us.

At twelve o'clock of the next day the 'phone rang.

Darrie answered it. After a few words she came for me, her face as white as a sheet....

"My God, Penton is in town!"

"--this is only Thursday ... he was not coming till Saturday!" I exclaimed, full of forboding.

"I knew, I knew he wouldn't keep his original mind!" exclaimed Hildreth.

"He's holding the wire ... wants to say something to you, Johnnie."

* * * * *

"Yes, Penton, what is it?"

"Only this," his voice replied, as if rehearsing a set speech, "yesterday afternoon I sent a telegram to my lawyer to institute proceedings for a divorce, and I mentioned you as co-respondent...."

"Damn you to hell ... I thought we were going to settle this in the radical way?"

"It's the only way out that I can see. I've stood this business till it's almost killing me."

"Well, is that all?"

"No ... somehow--how, I do not know, the _New York Journal_ has gotten hold of my wire ... it will be in all the papers to-night or to-morrow ... so I advise you and Hildreth to disappear quietly somewhere, if you don't want to see the reporters,--who will all presently be on the way to the flat."

"Damn you, Penton ... needn't tell _me_ about the news leaking out ... you've done it yourself ... now I want you to promise me only one thing, that you'll hold the reporters off for a couple of hours, till we have a good start."

"I'll do my best," answered he, "but please believe me. How they got the contents of the telegram I do not know, but on my honour I did not give it out nor did I tell the reporters where you are."

* * * * *

Hildreth was so angry she could hardly speak.

"This is a fine to-do," exclaimed Darrie, "Penton distinctly promised me--"

"I'd like to get a good crack at him!" I boasted, at the same time enjoying the excitement.

* * * * *

Hildreth began packing her clothes in a large suitcase ... as we later found she cast all her clean clothes aside, and in her excitement included all her soiled linen and lingerie....

We had our last meal together. I brought in a large bottle of white wine. All of us grew rather hilarious and made a merry joke of the adventure. We poked fun at Penton.

We sallied forth at the front door, Darrie to go to the Martha Washington. "I don't want to be mixed up in the coming uproar and scandal," she exclaimed ... "so far, I'm clear of all blame, and I know only too well what the papers would insinuate."

Hildreth and I took train for New Jersey ... two tickets for--anywhere ... in our excited condition we ran off first to Elizabeth. We had with us exactly one hundred dollars, which I had borrowed of Darrie before we parted on our several ways.

I registered for Hildreth and myself as "Mr. Arthur Mallory and wife," in the register of an obscure hotel hear the noise and clatter of a hundred trains drawing continually out and in.

It made me happy and important to sign her name on the register as something belonging to me.

Once alone in the room, Hildreth, to my consternation, could talk of nothing else but Penton.

"--to think that he would do such a thing to me, only to think of it!" she cried vehemently, again and again.

"If he believes in freedom for men and women, why was all this necessary? the sordidness of the public clamour? the divorce court?... oh, my poor, dear, sweet, wild poet-boy, you're in for it! Don't you wish you were well out of all this and back in Kansas again?"

"No; I am glad. As long as I am with you I don't care what happens. I love you, Hildreth!"

* * * * *

In the night she woke, screaming, from a nightmare. I could hardly stop her.

"Hush, dearest ... darling ... sweetheart ... I am with you; everything is all right" ... then, as she kept it up, "for God's sake ... Hildreth, do be quiet ... you're all right ... the man you love is here, close by you ... no harm shall come to you."

"Oh, Johnnie," clutching me, quivering, "I've just had such a horrible dream," sobbing as I took her tenderly in my arms....

"There, there, darling!"

She was quiet now.

"In a few minutes we would have had the whole hotel breaking in at the door ... thinking I was killing you."

* * * * *

She woke up again, and woke me up.

"Johnnie, find me some ink and a pen. I'm going to write that cad a letter that will shrivel him up like acid."

"Can't you wait till morning, Hildreth?" sleepily.

"No ... I _must_ write it now."

I dressed. I went down to the hotel writing-room and came back with pen and ink.

She sat up in bed and wrote the letter. She then read it aloud to me. She was immensely pleased with her effort.

With a final gesticulation of vindictive, feminine joy, she succeeded in spilling the whole bottle of ink on the white bed-spread.

"Now you've done it."

"We'll have to clear out early before the chambermaid comes in ... we're only staying here for one night and can't waste our money paying for the damage."

In the morning I bought the papers.

The _American_ had made a scoop. There it was, the story of the whole thing on the front page.

"PENTON BAXTER SUES FOR DIVORCE
--------------------------
NAMES VAGABOND-POET AS CO-RESPONDENT"

There it stood, in big head-lines.

The actuality stared us in the face. We belonged to each other now. It was no longer a summer idyll, but a practical reality.

As we took the train for Long Branch we realised that we had plunged midmost into the action that would put all our theories to the test....

I looked at my woman with a sidelong glance, as she sat beside me on the train seat.... She was so pretty, so frail, so feminine that I pitied her, while at the same time my heart swelled with tenderness for her, and with pride of possession. For she was mine now without dispute. She, for her part, spoke but little, except illogically to upbraid Penton Baxter, as if he had perpetrated an ill on two people thoroughly innocent.

I was angry with him on other grounds ... he was not playing the radical game, but taking advantage of the rules of the conventional world.

With a fugitive sense of pursuit, we hired a cabby to drive us to a summer boarding house at Long Branch ... where Hildreth and I rented a single large room for both of us....

And there Hildreth immediately went into hysterics, and did nothing but weep. While I waited on her hand and foot, bringing up food to her because she was sensitive about the probability of people recognising her.

We stayed there a week. Each day the papers were full of our mysterious disappearance ... reporters were combing the country to find us. Reports of our being in various places were sent in by enterprising local correspondents....

Again we entrained ... for Sea Girt.

An old cabman who drove a dilapidated rig hailed us with uplifted whip.

"We are looking for a place to board."

"I'll take you to a nice, quiet place, just suited to two home-loving folks like you," he replied, thinking he had paid us a compliment, and whipping up his ancient nag.

Hildreth gave me a nudge and a merry look and it pleased me to see she still had her sense of humour left.

That night, as I held her in my arms, "Don't let these little, trivial inconveniences and incidents--the petty persecutions we are undergoing, have any effect on our great love," I pleaded.

"That's all very well, darling Johnnie, but where are we going to?"

"We'll find a cottage somewhere ... a pretty little cottage within our means," I replied, visioning a vine-trellised place such as poets and their brides must live in.

"Our money is giving out ... soon we'll have--to turn back to New York!"

"If we do, that need not part us.... I'll get a job on some newspaper or magazine and take care of you."

* * * * *

When I called for my mail at the Sea Girt post office, sure of hearing from Darrie, anyhow,--who promised us she would keep us posted, I found no letter. And the man at the window was certain he had handed over several letters addressed to me to someone else who had called for them, giving my name as his.

A wave of hot anger suffused my face. How stupid of me not to have noticed it before. Now I remembered the men who had followed us.

Our mail was being intercepted. How was Baxter to procure his divorce without gaining evidence in just such a way?

* * * * *

One night I started on a long walk alone. I walked along the beach. In the dark I took off my clothes and plunged for a swim into the chilly surf ... a high sea was thundering in. I was caught in the undertow, swept off my feet, and dragged beyond by depth ... for a moment I was of a heart to let go, to permit myself to be drowned ... I was even intrigued, for the moment, by the thought of what the newspapers would say about my passing over in such a romantic way.

But the will to live rose up in me. And I fought my way,--and it was a bitter fight,--back to shallow water. I flung myself prone on the beach, exhausted.

When I reached our room again, I related my adventure to Hildreth.

It was she who took care of me now. I lay all night in a high fever ... but I was so happy, for the woman of my heart sat close by me, holding my hand, speaking soft terms of endearment to me, tending to all my wants.

This tenderness, this solicitude and companionship seemed for the first time better to me than the maddest transports of passion that swept us into one.

* * * * *

In the morning mail came a letter, general delivery, from Penton.... Now I was sure he was having our every step watched. A blind passion against him rose in me ... the little bounder!

In the letter he asked me to meet him at the Sea Girt railway station at four o'clock. I made it by the time indicated, by a brisk walk.

There he was, dropping off the train as it came to a stop. Another scene flashed through my mind, a visual remembrance of the day he had dropped off to visit me at Laurel.

Then we had rushed toward each other, hands extended in warm, affectionate greeting ... now ... I slowly sauntered up to him.

"Yes, Penton, what do you want; how much longer are you going to torture your wife?"

"--yours now, Johnnie; mine no longer!" grimly.

"If she were wholly mine, I'd knock you flat ... but you still have a sort of right in her that protects you from what I otherwise might do to you."

"For heaven's sake, let's be calm."

"Calm--when you say in your letter, 'you need not be afraid, I meditate no harm?'--do you mean to imply that, under any circumstance, I would be afraid of you?"

"Johnnie, there is only one way to settle this ... I'm set on getting the complete evidence for a divorce ... exactly where is Hildreth now?"

"None of your damned business ... all I can say is that she is somewhere near here ... and she's sick and hysterical through your persecutions ... and if you don't call off your snooping detectives, by the Lord God, if I run into any of them, I'll try to kill them."

"Johnnie, it's the best thing to deliver the legal evidence and have it over with. Let me accompany you to where Hildreth is, and--"

"If she set eyes on you," I replied, "she'd fly at you and scratch your eyes out--in her present mood."

"Only _show_ me where she is, then--point out the place."

"If I find you snooping around, you'll need hospital attention for a long time."

"Then you won't help facilitate the proceedings, secretly?"

"No, since you've begun this game, find out what you can yourself. What do you think I am?"

"A very foolish young man to treat me so when I am still your best friend."

"Here comes the north-bound train. You hop aboard and go on back to New York."

Seething with rage, I caught Penton Baxter by the arm and thrust him up the steps....

* * * * *

Next morning came a letter from Darrie, from the Martha Washington. We were the talk of the town, she told us.

She had tried to keep Penton from employing detectives to follow us. She advised us to return to New York--we must be out of money by this time....

Hildreth could stay at her mother's and father's flat till we made further arrangements for going off some place together.

* * * * *

"Darling, if we return from what has proven to be a wild-goose chase, will you promise me not to become disheartened, to lose faith in me?"

"Of course not, Johnnie ... I think Darrie offered very good advice," she sighed.

Back we turned, by the next day's train, full of a sense of frustration; what an involved, unromantic, practical world we lived in!

* * * * *

Hildreth heaved a sigh of content as we walked into her mother's flat again. Her mother was still at Eden ... alone ... taking care of Daniel, for whom she had a great love.

We had Darrie over the telephone, and soon she was with us, giving us the latest news of the uproar.

The papers were at us pro and con, mostly con.

Dorothy Dix had written a nasty attack on me, saying that I was climbing to fame over a woman's prostrate body ... that, in my own West, instead of a judge and a divorce court, a shotgun Would have presided in my case....

The _Globe_ was running a forum, suddenly stopped, as to whether people of genius and artistic temperament should be allowed more latitude than ordinary folk....

As Hildreth and I rode down Broadway together, side by side, unrecognised, on a street car, we saw plastered everywhere, "Stop That Affinity Hunt," a play of that name to be shown at Maxime Elliott's Theatre....

I must admit that I was pleased with the sudden notoriety that had come to me ... years of writing poetry had made my name known but moderately, here and there ... but having run away with a famous man's wife, my name was cabled everywhere ... even appeared in Japanese, Russian, and Chinese newspapers....

* * * * *

But this was not what I wanted of the papers ... I must use this space offered me to propagandise my ideas of free love....

So I arranged to meet Penton privately in the lobby of the Martinique.

* * * * *

Hildreth and I were there, waiting, before Penton came the next day. Appearing, he wore the old, bland, childlike smile, and he shook hands with us as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Someone had tipped off the reporters and they were on time, too, crowding about us eagerly. One young fellow from the _Sun_, looking like a graduate from a school of divinity, asked a special interview of me alone, which I gave ... afterward ... in a corner.

That _Sun_ reporter gave me the fairest deal I ever received. He talked with me over an hour, without ever setting pencil to paper ... the other interviews were long over, Penton had left, Hildreth sat chafing....

"Come over and join us, Hildreth."

She sat listening in silence while I continued rehearsing all my ideas on marriage, love, divorce ... how love should be all ... how there should, ideally, be no marriage ceremony ... but if any at all, only after the first child had been born ... how the state should have nothing to do with the private love-relations of the individual....

The reporter from the _Sun_ shook hands good-bye.

"But you haven't taken a single note!" I protested.

"I have it all here, in my head."

"But how can you report me accurately?"

"See to-morrow's _Sun_."

* * * * *

The interview with me was a marvel in two ways: it represented to a hair's breadth everything I had pronounced, transmuted into the reporter's own style of writing ... it curtailed my conversation where I had repeated myself or wandered off into trivial detail.

* * * * *

"I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas!" I had exclaimed to Hildreth, in the hearing of the reporters.

"Oh, bother Kansas!" replied Hildreth humorously.

For a month "I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas" was a catch-word for Broadway and the town.

When the _Evening Journal_ put us in their "Dingbat Family" I enjoyed the humour of it. But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.

"You and Penton," remarked she, "for men of culture and sensibility, have bigger blind spots than ordinary in your make-up. Why, Johnnie, I believe you enjoy the comic pictures about this business!...

"The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced--not through newspaper interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting."

* * * * *

Baxter's lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ... "collusion," he warned Penton; "they'll call it collusion and you won't get your final decree."

Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cluster of them ... "_Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit_" ... with dogs' heads on all of us ... Hildreth, with the head of a hound dog, long hound-ears flopping, with black jade ear-rings in them ... Penton, a woe-begone little pug....

A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, "_The Affinity Nest of the Hobo Poet_," I think it was legended ... then I was drawn standing, one leg crossed over the other, the peak of the toe jauntily resting on the ground, hand-in-breast like an old-fashioned picture. There was a tin can thrown over the shoulder of the tattered bulldog that represented me ... one of my ears went through my hat ... beneath, a rhyme ran:

"I am the hobo poet,
I lead a merry life:
One day I woo the Muse, the next,
Another fellow's wife!"

* * * * *

I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West Grove, N.J., where we had gone finally to escape the city, and the swarm of reporters that seemed never to cease pursuing us ... for, when we found out that they did not want propaganda, we sought to hide away from them....

Hildreth had been rather gloomy at breakfast that morning, and I thought she would join in a laugh with me over Tad's horse-play. There is a streak in me that makes me enjoy the grotesque slap-stick of the comic artists.

When Hildreth saw the cartoons, she laughed a little, at first; then she wept violently.

Then she wrote a savage letter to Tad, letting him know what she thought of his vulgarity.

* * * * *

"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."

Nevertheless, it was the humanness in me that brought all the reporters who came to interview us to sympathise with Hildreth and me, instead of with Penton.

* * * * *

Yes, we had found our dream-cottage ... back in the lovely pines, near West Grove. At a nominal sum of fifteen dollars a month; the actress who owned it, sympathising with our fight, had rented it to me for the fall and winter ... if we could stand the bitter cold in a summer cottage....

There Hildreth stayed, seemingly alone, with Darrie, who had come down to chaperon her. To the reporters who sought her out when her place of retreat became known, she averred that she had no idea of my whereabouts. In the meantime, under the name of Mallory, I was living near by, was renting a room in the house of a Mrs. Rond, whose husband was an artist.

I came and went to and from my cottage by a bye-path through the pines that led to the back door.

Darrie, as we called her, performed the most difficult task of all--the task of remaining friends to all parties concerned.