Chapter VII: Part 7

Bud and the farmer were taken out; by the side of each a pail of water was placed ... they were seated on stools, stripped to the waist. The surgeons dressed their wounds as if on a battlefield. "Jack" needed ten stitches in his scalp.... Bud had four knife wounds that demanded sewing up. Both the boys went pale like ghosts and spewed their bellies empty from weakness and loss of blood....

"Mind you, you chaps in there have raised 'bout enough hell ... ef I hear o' any more trouble, I'll take you all out one by one an' treat each one o' you-all to a good cowhidin', law or no law!"

* * * * *

I was let alone after that. My cowardice had gone forever. I was now a man among men. I was happy. I saw what an easy thing it is to fight, to defend yourself. I saw what an exhilaration, a pleasure, the exchanging of righteous blows can be.

* * * * *

Always my dream was of being a big man when I got out--some day. Always I acted as if living a famous prison romance like that of Baron Von Trenck's.

* * * * *

I collected from the living voices of my fellow prisoners innumerable jail and cocaine songs, and rhymes of the criminal world. I wrote them down on pieces of wrapping paper that the jailer occasionally covered the food-basket with in lieu of newspaper.

"Oh, coco-Marie, and coco-Marai,
I'se gon' ta whiff cocaine 'twill I die.
Ho! (sniff) Ho! (sniff) baby, take a whiff of me!"

(The sniffing sound indicating the snuffing up into the nostril of the "snow," or "happy dust," as it is called in the underworld.)

Then there was the song about lice:

"There's a lice in jail
As big as a rail;
When you lie down
They'll tickle your tail--
Hard times in jail, poor boy!..."

And another, more general:

"Along come the jailer
About 'leven o'clock,
Bunch o' keys in his right hand,
The jailhouse do'h was locked....
'Cheer up, you pris'ners,'
I heard that jailer say,
'You got to go to the cane-brakes
Foh ninety yeahs to stay!'"

As you can guess, most of these jail songs and ballads of the underworld could only be printed in asterisks. I was hoping, in the interests of folklore, to preserve them for some learned society's private printing press.

* * * * *

A fresher green came to the stray branches of the trees that crossed our barred windows. The world outside seemed to waken with bird-song. It was spring, and time for the sitting of the grand jury that was to decide whether we were, each of us, to be held over for trial by petty jury ... days of fretful eagerness and discontent ... from the windows the yellow trusty-girl said she could see lines of buggies driving in to town. It was the custom of farmers for miles around to drive in to their county seat during the court assizes ... a week or so of holidays like a continuous circus for them.

When the sheriff would have occasion to come into the room in which stood our big cage, the boys would crowd up to the bars, each one hoping for news favourable to his case ... the prevailing atmosphere was one of hope.

* * * * *

The negro who had murdered his wife and her sweetheart with a shotgun had already had his trial. He was--and had been--but waiting the arrival of the prison contractor, as the latter went from county jail to county jail, gathering in his flock, and taking them away, chained together, to the penitentiary and the cane brakes ... "where only a big buck nigger can live," the little pickpocket had told me, with fear in his voice....

He came ... the contractor ... to our jail at midnight. All of us leaped from our mattresses to witness the dreary procession of neck-chained and be-manacled convicted men. In the light of the swinging lanterns, a lurid spectacle. Our man was taken out and chained in with the gang. They clanked away down the stairs, leaving us who remained with heavy chains on our hope instead of on our necks and hands and legs ... because of the sight we had just seen. For the passing day or so we were so depressed that we wandered about saying nothing to each other, like dumb men.

* * * * *

One after the other the men had true bills found against them, and little slips of folded paper were thrust in to them through the bars of their cells. And shyster lawyers who fatten on the misfortunes of the prison-held being, began to hold whispered conversations (and conferences) from without, mainly to find out just how much each prisoner could raise for fees for defence....

Bud and I were the only ones left. All the others had had true bills found against them.

* * * * *

But there came an afternoon when the big, hulky sheriff, with the cruel, quizzical eyes, came to the back bars of our cell and summoned us up with a mysterious air....

"Well, boys," he began, pausing to squirt a long, brown stream of tobacco juice, "well, boys--" and he paused again.

My nerves were so on edge that I controlled with difficulty a mad impulse to curse at the sheriff for holding us in such needless suspense....

Taking another deliberate chew off his plug, he told us that after mature deliberation the grand jury had decided that there was not enough grounds for finding a true bill against us, and, as a consequence, we were to be let go free.

* * * * *

The following morning I had the satisfaction of hearing from old Jacklin, the jailer, that Womber, the owner of the warehouse, had himself gone before the grand jury and informed them that he did not wish to press the charge of burglary against us....

Womber, Jacklin said, had received my letter and at first had tossed it aside ... even thrown it contemptuously into the wastebasket. But his wife and daughter had raked it out and read it and had, day and night, given him no peace till he had promised to "go easy on the poor boys."

This was my triumph over Bud--the triumph of romance over realism.

"I'm glad we're getting out, but there's more damn fools in the world than I thought," he remarked, with a sour smile of gratification.

* * * * *

And now, with new, trembling eagerness, we two began waiting for the hour of our release. That very afternoon it would be surely, we thought ... that night ... then the next morning ... then ... the next day....

But until a week more had flown, the sheriff did not let us go. In order to make a little more profit on his feeding contract, averred our prisoners.

But on Saturday morning he came to turn us loose. By this time we seemed blood brothers to the others in the cage ... negro ... mulatto ... white ... criminal and vicious ... weak, and victims of circumstance ... everything sloughed away. Genuine tears stood in our eyes as with strong hand-grips we wished the poor lads good luck!

We stumbled down the jail stairway up which, three months before, we had been conducted to our long incarceration in the cage. The light of free day stormed in on our prison-inured eyes in a blinding deluge of white and gold ... we stepped out into what seemed not an ordinary world, but a madness and tumult of birds, a delirious green of trees too beautiful for any place outside the garden of Paradise.

"Come on," said Bud, "let's go on down the main street and thank Womber for not pressing the case--"

"To hell with Womber!"

"Well, then, I'm going to thank him."

"I'm grateful enough.... I might write him a letter thanking him ... but I'm not anxious to linger in this neighbourhood."

So Bud and I parted company, shaking hands good-bye; he headed west ... to China and the East, finally, he said ... I never knew his real name ... neither of us gave his right name to the town's officials....

As I sought the railroad tracks again, the good air and my unwonted freedom made me stagger, so that several negroes laughed at me heartily, thinking I was drunk.

* * * * *

I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown package out of my inside pocket--the brown paper on which I had inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal, and prostitute life I had heard during my three months' sojourn behind bars.

I looked them over again. With all their smut and filth, they were yet full of naive folk-touches and approximations to real balladry. I was as tender of the manuscript as a woman would be with her baby.

* * * * *

The sky grew overcast. A rain storm blew up. A heavy wind mixed with driving wet ... chilly ... I found shelter under a leaky shed ... was soggy and miserable ... even wished, in a weak moment, for the comparative comfort of my cell again....

The fast freight I was waiting for came rocking along. I made a run for it in the rapidly gathering dusk. I grabbed the bar on one side and made a leap for the step, but missed, like a frantic fool, with one foot--luckily caught it with the other, or I might have fallen underneath--and was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.

Not till I had climbed in between the cars on the bumpers did I realise that my coat had been torn open and my much-valued songs jostled out.

Without hesitation I hurled myself bodily off the train. My one idea to regain the MSS. I landed on my shoulders, saw stars, rolled over and over. I groped up and down. And tears rained from my eyes when I understood those rhymes were lost forever....

It was midnight before I caught another freight. I climbed wearily into an empty box car while the freight was standing still. I was seen. A brakeman came to the door and lifted up his lantern, glancing within, I was crouching, wet and forlorn, in a corner of the car, waiting for the freight to be under way.

"Come on out with you! Hit the grit!" commanded the "shack" grimly.

I rose. I came to the door. I hated him in my heart, but quite simply and movingly I recited the story of my imprisonment, ending by asking him to let me ride, in the name of God.

He crunched away down the path, his lantern bobbing as he went.

* * * * *

All night long I rode ... bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump! All night long my head was a-ferment with dreams of the great things I would achieve, now that I was free of the shadow of imprisonment.

* * * * *

When I walked down the streets of Haberford once more, though I was leathery and stronger-looking, my adventures had added no meat to my bones. I was amused at myself as I walked along more than usually erect, for no other reason than to keep my coat-tail well down in back in order not to show the hole in the seat of my trousers. As I came down the street on which my father and I had lived, an anticipatory pleasure of being recognised as a sort of returned Odysseus beat through my veins like a drum. But no one saw me who knew me. It hurt me to come home, unheralded.

I came to the house where I had dwelt. I pulled the bell. There was no answer. I walked around the corner to the telegraph office. I was overjoyed to see lean, lanky Phil, the telegraph operator, half sleeping, as usual, over the key of his instrument.

"Hel-lo, John Gregory!" he shouted, with glad surprise in his voice.

* * * * *

He telephoned my father ... who came over from the works, running with gladness. I was immediately taken home. I took three baths that afternoon before I felt civilised again....

* * * * *

My father had returned to the Composite Works. I was alone in my little room, with all my cherished books once more. They had been, I could plainly observe, kept orderly and free of dust, against cay home-coming. I took down my favourite books, kissing each one of them like a sweetheart. Then I read here and there in all of them, observing all the old passages I had marked. I lay in all attitudes. Sprawling on the floor on my back, on my belly ... on my side ... now with my knees crossed....

Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley ... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a world of actuality!...

I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof of every tale or anecdote....

I captained ships, saw Chinese slaughtered by the thousands, fought bandits on the outskirts of Manila, helped loot the palace of the empress in the Sacred City at Pekin ... tales of peril and adventure that I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own experiences.

All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....

But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination, too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to me. And another dream I had--of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped making up adventures, especially the disagreeable ones, because they eventually had more effect on me than they did on my auditors.

* * * * *

My father had changed boarding places ... but, as usual, it was not better food, but a little, dark widow that attracted him to that boarding house.

* * * * *

I now devoted myself exclusively to poetry--the reading of it. I always had a book in my pocket. I read even at meals, despite my father's protests that it was bad-mannered.

* * * * *

Breasted's book store, down in Newark, was where I was nearly always to be found, in the late afternoons.

It was there, in the murky light of a dying twilight, that I came Upon the book that has meant more to my life than any other book ever written....

For a long time I had known of John Keats, that there was such a poet. But, in the fever of my adolescence, in the ferment of my tramp-life, I had not yet procured his poetry....

Now, here were his complete works, right at hand, in one volume ... a damaged but typographically intact copy....

I had, once before, dipped into his _Endymion_ and had been discouraged ... but this time I began to read him with his very first lines--his dedication to Leigh Hunt, beginning:

"Glory and loveliness have passed away."

Then I went on to a pastoral piece:

"I stood tiptoe upon a little hill."

I forgot where I was. A new world of beauty was opened to me.... I read and read....

"Come, Gregory, it's time to close"--a voice at my elbow. It was Breasted's assistant, a little, curious man who reminded me of my sky-pilot at Sydney. He, also, wore a black, long-tailed coat. He was known as "the perfessor."

"You've been standing here as quiet as a crane for three hours."

"How much do you want for this book?"

"A quarter ... for you!" He always affected to make me special reductions, as an old customer....

A quarter was all I had. I paid for my Keats, and walked home. Walked? I went with wings on each heel. I was as genuinely converted to a new life as a sinner is converted to the Christian religion.

I lit the light in my room. All night I read and re-read, not a whit sleepy or tired.

I went for a week in a mad dream, my face shining and glowing with inner ecstasy and happiness.

* * * * *

There did not seem to be time enough in the twenty-four hours of each day for reading and studying and writing. And a new thing came to me: a shame for my shadow thinness and a desire to build myself into a better physical man.

At that time _McFadden's Physical Culture Magazine_ was becoming widely read. I came across a copy of it. I found in it a guide to what I was in search for. Faithfully I took up physical culture. Fanatically I kept all the windows open, wore as little clothing as possible ... adopted a certain walk on tiptoe, like a person walking on egg-shells, to develop the calves of my legs from their thinness to a more proportionate shape. And, as I walked, I filled and emptied my lungs like a bellows. I kept a small statue of Apollo Belvedere on top of my bookcase. I had a print of the Flying Mercury on the wall, at the foot of my bed. Each morning, on waking, I filled my mind full of these perfect specimens of manhood, considering that by so doing I would gradually pilot my body to physical perfection.... I know that many things I say about myself will appeal to the "wit" as humorous. I can't help it if I am laughed at ... everybody would be, if they told the truth about themselves, like this.

* * * * *

I joined the Y.M.C.A. for the physical side, not for the spiritual. I found a spirit that I did not like there, a sort of mental deadness and ineffectually. But one thing the Y.M.C.A. did for me: I found on the bulletin board one day an announcement of the summer term of Mt. Hebron Preparatory School.... It was a school for poor boys and men ... neither age nor even previous preparation counted ... only earnestness of purpose. And, as each student had his two hours' work a day to do, the expense for each term was nominal.

I had been paid fifty dollars for my article on my adventures in the New York Sunday paper. A Newark Sunday paper bought several articles also. To the money I had saved up my father contributed as much again. I started for preparatory school.

* * * * *

Mt. Hebron School consisted of a series of buildings set apart on a hill. It was an evangelical school founded by a well-known revivalist--William Moreton.

Around it lay pine forests and, at its feet, the valley of the Connecticut River.

No matter what subjects they taught, the main endeavour of its professors, in season and out, was the conversion of every freshman immediately to Evangelical Christianity, as soon as he had had his quarters assigned to him....

Scarcely had we settled ourselves, each with his roommate, than the two weeks' revival began. I will not enter into the details of this revival. This was merely the opening of the summer term. At the opening of the school year in the fall--that was when they held the _real_ revival,--and the story of the whipped-up frenzy of that will afford a more characteristic flavour.

* * * * *

It put a singing in my heart to find myself at last a student in a regular preparatory school, with my face set toward college.

I had passed my examinations with credit, especially the one in the Bible. This won me immediate notice and approval among the professors. Fortunate, indeed, I now regarded those three months in jail ... the most fruitful and corrective period of my life. For not only had I studied the Bible assiduously there, but I had learned American history--especially that of the Civil War period ... and I had studied arithmetic and algebra, so that in these subjects I managed to slide through.

* * * * *

I was put to cleaning stalls and currying horses for my two hours' work each day. Though I hated manual labour, I bent my back to the tasks with a will, glad to endure for the fulfillment of my dream.

That first summer I took Vergil and began Homer. I had studied these poets by myself already, but found many slack ends that only the aid and guidance of a professor could clear up. And, allowing for their narrow religious viewpoints, real or affected, in order to hold their positions, they were fine teachers--my teachers of Latin and Greek--with real fire in them.... Professor Lang made Homer and his days live for us. The old Greek warriors rose up from the dust, and I could see the shining of their armour, hear the clash of their swords.

Professor Dunn made of Vergil a contemporary poet....

Lang was of the fair Norse type, so akin to the Greek in adventurous spirit. Dunn was of the dark, stocky, imperial Roman type. In a toga he would have resembled some Roman senator....

That summer there were long woodland walks for me, when I would take a volume of some great English poet from the library and roam far a-field.

* * * * *

After that first summer it was my father who kept me at school. He was too poor to pay in a lump sum for my tuition, so he sent four dollars every week from his meagre pay, to keep me going.

* * * * *

There was a wide, wind-swept oval for an athletic field. From it you gazed on a beautiful vista of valleys and enfolding hills. Here every afternoon I practiced running ... to the frequent derision of the other athletes, who made fun of my skinny legs, body, and arms....

But as I ran, and ran, every afternoon, my mile, the boys stopped laughing, and I heard them say among themselves, "Old Gregory, he'll get there!"

After the exercise there would be the rub-down with fragrant witch hazel ... then supper!

A dining-room, filled to the full, every table, with five hundred irrepressible boys ... it was a cheerful and good attendance at each of the three meals. We joined together in saying a blessing. We sang a lusty hymn together, accompanied on the little, wheezy, dining-room organ. I liked the good, simple melodies sung, straight and hearty, without trills and twirls....

Every night, just before "lights out," at ten, fifteen minutes was set aside, called "silent time"--and likewise in the morning, just before breakfast-bell--for prayer and religious meditation.

* * * * *

Jimmy Anderson, my little blond roommate, fair-haired and delicate-faced as a girl (his sisters, on the contrary, not femininely pretty, as he, but masculine and handsome)--Jimmy Anderson read his Bible and knelt and prayed during both "silent times."

I read the Bible and prayed for the quiet, religious luxury of it. My prayer, when I prayed, was just to "God," not Jehovah ... not to God of any sect, religion, creed.

"Dear God," ran always my prayer, "Dear God, if you really exist, make me a great poet. I ask for nothing else. Only let me become famous."

* * * * *

I was so happy in my studies,--my work, even,--my wanderings in the woods and along the country roads, with the poets under my arms.... I read them all, from Layamon's _Brut_ on. For, for me, all that existed was poetry. At this stage of my life it was my be-all and end-all.

* * * * *

My father was a most impractical man. He would sit in his office as foreman, read the New York _Herald_, and suck at an unlit cigar, telling anyone who listened how he would be quite happy to retire and run a little chicken farm somewhere the rest of his life.

The men all liked him ... gave him a present every Christmas ... but they never jumped up and lit into their work, when they saw him coming, as they did for the other bosses. And the management, knowing his easiness, never paid him over twenty or twenty-five dollars a week. But whenever I could cozen an extra dollar out of him, alleging extra school expenses, I would do so. It meant that I could buy some more books of poetry.

* * * * *

I was sent from the stable out into the fields to work ... harder and more back-breaking than currying horses. But my labour was alleviated by the fact that a little renegade ex-priest from Italy worked by my side,--and while we weeded beets or onions, or hoed potatoes, he taught me how to make Latin a living language by conversing in it with me.

* * * * *

There were no women on the hill but the professors' wives, and they were an unattractive lot. We were as exempt from feminine influence as a gathering of monks--excepting when permission was given any of us to go over to Fairfield, where, besides the native New England population of women and girls, was situated the girls' branch of our educational establishment....

* * * * *

The fall term ... the opening of the regular school year. The regular students began to pour in, dumping off the frequent trains at the little school station ... absurd youths dressed in the exaggerated style of college and preparatory school ... peg-top trousers ... jaunty, postage-stamp caps ... and there was cheering and hat-waving and singing in the parlours of the dormitories on each floor.

* * * * *

There were three dormitory groups on the "hill." The "villas" were the most aristocratic. There the "gentlemen" among the students, and the teachers' favourites, dwelt--with the teachers. Then there was Crosston Hall, and Oberly. Crosston was the least desirable of the halls. It was there that I lived.

We were hardly settled in our rooms when the usual fall revival began....

One of the founders of the school, a well-known New England manufacturer, came on his yearly pilgrimage ... a fanatic disciple of the great Moreton, he considered it his duty to see to the immediate conversion, by every form of persuasion and subtle compulsion, of every newly arrived student.

Rask was a tall, lean, ashen-faced man. He had yellow, prominent teeth and an irregular, ascetic face. In his eyes shone an undying lightning and fire of sincere fanaticism and spiritual ruthlessness that, in mediaeval times, would not have stopped short of the stake and fagot to convince sinners of the error of their ways.

The evangelist's two sons also hove on the scene from across the river ... both of them were men of pleasing appearance. There was the youthful, elegant, dark, intellectual-browed John Moreton, who had doctorates of divinity from half a dozen big theological seminaries at home and abroad; and there was the business man of the two--Stephen, middle-aged before his time, staid and formal ... to the latter, the twin schools: the seminary for girls and the preparatory school for boys--and the revivalistic religion that Went with them, meant a, sort of exalted business functioning ... this I say not at all invidiously ... the practical business ideal was to him the highest way of men's getting together ... the _quid pro quo_ basis that even God accepted.

* * * * *

The first night of the opening of the term, when the boys had scarcely been herded together in their respective dormitories, the beginning of the revival was announced from the little organ that stood in the middle of the dining-room ... a compulsory meeting, of course. In newly acquainted groups, singing, whistling, talking, and laughing, as schoolboys will, the students tramped along the winding path that led to the chapel on the crest of the hill.

On the platform sat the teachers. In the most prominent chair, with its plush seat and its old-fashioned peaked back, sat the evangelist-manufacturer, Rask,--the shine of hungry fanaticism in his face like a beacon, his legs crossed, a dazzling shine on his shoes, his hands clutching a hymn book like a warrior's weapon.

Little Principal Stanton stood nearby, his eyes gleaming spectrally through his glasses, his teeth shining like those of a miniature Roosevelt.

"We will begin," he snapped decisively, "with John Moreton's favourite hymn, when he was with us in this world."

We rose and sang, "There is a green hill far away--"

Then there were prayers and hymns and more prayers, and a lengthy exhortation from Rask, who avowed that if it wasn't for God in his heart he couldn't run his business the way he did; that God was with him every hour of his life,--and oh, wouldn't every boy there before him take the decisive step and come to Christ, and find the joy and peace that passeth understanding ... he would not stop exhorting, he asserted, till every boy in the room had come to Jesus....

And row by row,--Rask still standing and exhorting,--each student was solicited by the seniors, who went about from bench to bench, kneeling by sinners who proved more refractory ... the professors joined in the task, led by the principal himself.

Finally they eliminated the sheep from the goats by asking all who accepted the salvation of Christ to rise. In one sweep, most of the boys rose to their feet ... some sheepishly, to run with the crowd ... but a few of us were more sincere, and did not rise ... it was at these that the true fire of the professors and seniors was levelled.

They knelt by us. They prayed. They agonised. They groaned. They adjured us, by our mothers, to come to Jesus ... all the while, over and over again, softly, was sung, "O Lamb of God, I come, I come!"

"Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me!"

Weakening under the pressure, and swung by the power of herd-instinct, most of us "came."

Then there was the hypnotism of the enthusiasm which laid hold of us. It was indescribable in its power. It even made me want to rise and declare myself, to shout and sing, to join the religious and emotional debauch.

When chapel adjourned at ten o'clock many had been cajoled and bullied into the fold. Then, still insatiable for religion, at the villas and halls, the praying and hymn-singing was kept up.

In the big parlour of Crosston Hall the boys grouped in prayer and rejoicing. One after the other each one rose and told what God had done for him. One after the other, each offered up prayer.

Toward three o'clock the climax was reached, when the captain of the hall's football team jumped to a table in an extra burst of enthusiasm and shouted, "Boys, all together now,--three cheers for Jesus Christ!"

I was one of the three in our hall who resisted all efforts at conversion. The next morning a group of convertees knelt and prayed for me, in front of my door ... that God might soften the hardness of my heart and show me the Light.

For two weeks the flame of the revival burned. Some were of the opinion that from the school this time a fire would go forth and sweep the world....

There were prayer-meetings, prayer-meetings, prayer-meetings ... between classes, during study-periods, at every odd minute of time to be snatched.

Though, my preceding summer, my chief pastime had been to argue against the Bible, all this praying and mental pressure was bound to have an influence on my imaginative nature....

Besides, the temptation toward hypocrisy was enormous. The school was honeycombed with holy spies who imputed it merit to report the laxity of others. And, once you professed open belief, everything immediately grew easy and smooth--even to the winning of scholarships there, and, on graduation, in the chief colleges of the land.

So, suddenly, I took to testifying at prayer meetings, half believing I meant it, half because of the advantages being a professed Christian offered. And the leaders sang and rejoiced doubly in the Lord over the signal conversion of so hard and obdurate a sinner as I.

* * * * *

One day, as I was marching in line from the chapel, a queer thing took place....

One of the boys whom I could not identify hissed, "Go on, you hypocrite!" at me.

* * * * *

In a few weeks the pendulum swung as far to the other extreme. My hypocrisy made me sick of living in my own body with myself. I threw off the transient cloak of assumed belief. Once more I attacked the stupidity of belief in a six-day God, inventor of an impossible paradise, an equally impossible hell.

* * * * *

In the early spring I left school before the term was over, impatient, restless, at odds with the faculty ... Stanton termed it "under a cloud." I had my eyes set on another ideal.

* * * * *

Down in the mosquito-infested pine woods of New Jersey Stephen Barton had located. Barton was possessed with the dream of making the men and women of the world physically perfect--a harking back to the old Greeks with their worship of the perfection of bodily beauty and health. I had long been a reader of his magazines, a follower of his cult, and, now that I heard of his planning to build a city out in the open country, where people could congregate who wished to live according to his teachings, I enrolled myself ardently as one of his first followers and disciples....

Barton had taken over a great barn-like, abandoned factory building that stood on the shore of an artificial lake--which, in his wife's honour, he re-named after her, Lake Emily ... his wife was a fussy Canadian woman who interfered in everyone's affairs beyond endurable measure. I was told she used to steal off the chair the old clothes Barton used to wear by preference--paddling along the winding creek in a canoe to his work each morning, his pants rolled up to the knees--and put in their stead a new, nicely creased suit!

* * * * *

Barton's face was wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs--one of the boys who had known him a long time said his chief sorrow was that he could never develop his legs the way he wished them to be.

* * * * *

We began the building of the city. We laid out the streets through the pines ... many of us went clad in trunks ... or in nothing ... as we surveyed, and drove stakes. The play of the sun and the wind on the naked skin--there is nothing pleasanter, what though one has to slap away horseflies and mosquitoes ... the vistas through the pines were glorious. I saw in my mind's eyes a world of the physically perfect!

As the laying out of the sites and the streets progressed, dwellers came to join with us ... fanatics ... "nuts" of every description ... the sick....

* * * * *

A woman, the wife of some bishop or other, came to join us early in the season. She had cancer and came there to be cured of it by the nature treatment. She brought with her an old-fashioned army tent, and rented for its location the most desirable site on the lake shore.

She had a disagreement with Barton--and left to consult regular doctors. She turned over all rights to her tent and to the site to me.

"And mind you, Mr. Gregory," she admonished, "this tent and the place it stands on is as much yours as if you paid for it ... for it's paid for till Christmas."

So, with my Shelley, my Keats, and my growing pile of manuscript, I took possession. And with covering from the wet and weather over my head and with plenty of mosquito netting, I felt established for the summer.

Every morning I rose to behold the beauty of the little, mist-wreathed lake. Every morning I plunged, naked, into the water, and swam the quarter of a mile out to the float, and there went through my system of calisthenics.

I lived religiously on one meal a day--a mono-diet (mostly) of whole wheat grains, soaked in water till they burst open to the white of the inside kernel....

Everybody in our rapidly increasing tent-colony enjoyed a fad of his or her own. There was a little brown woman like the shrivelled inside of an old walnut, who believed that you should imbibe no fluid other than that found in the eating of fruits ... when she wanted a drink she never went to the pitcher, bucket, or well ... instead she sucked oranges or ate some watermelon. There was a man from Philadelphia who ate nothing but raw meat. He had eruptions all over his body from the diet, but still persisted in it. There were several young Italian nature-folk who ate nothing but vegetables and fruits, raw. They insisted that all the ills of flesh came to humanity with the cooking of food, that the sun was enough of a chef. If appearances prove anything, theirs was the theory nearest right. They were like two fine, sleek animals. A fire of health shone in their eyes. As they swam off the dam they looked like two strong seals.

Each had his special method of exercising--bending, jumping, flexing the muscles this way or that ... lying, sitting, standing!... those who brought children allowed them to run naked. And we older ones went naked, when we reached secluded places in the woods.

The townspeople from neighbouring small towns and other country folk used to come from miles about, Sundays, to watch us swim and exercise. The women wore men's bathing suits, the men wore just trunks. I wore only a gee-string, till Barton called me aside and informed me, that, although he didn't mind it, others objected. I donned trunks, then, like the rest of the men....

Behind board lean-tos,--one for the men, the other for the women,--we dressed and undressed....

One Sunday afternoon a Russian Jewess slipped off her clothes, in an innocent and inoffensive manner, just as if it was quite the thing,--standing up in plain view of everybody. There went up a great shout of spontaneous astonishment from both banks of the lake where the on-lookers sat. But the shout did not disturb the rather pretty, dark anarchist. Leisurely she stepped into her onepiece bathing suit.

* * * * *

Barton was a strange, strong-minded, ignorant man. Hardly able to compose a sentence in correct English, he employed educated, but unresourceful assistants who furnished the good grammar, while he supplied the initiative and original ideas, and increased the influence and circulation of his magazine. Also he lived strenuously up to the doctrines he taught; fasting, for instance.

Soon after I reached "Perfection City" he launched on his two weeks' annual fast. Up in the big house where he lived, in the next town of Andersonville (he himself would have been gladder of a mere shack or tent like the rest of us--but his wife negated any such idea) Mrs. Barton used to taunt and insult him by putting out the best food under his nose, during this time.

Mrs. Barton was a terror. She was ever inviting to her house that kind of people who know somebody "worth while" or are related to somebody who, in their turn, are, perhaps, related to--somebody else!...

In their presence she would patronise Barton by calling him "Stevie!" in her drawling, patronising manner....

When the woman came in among the tents and shacks of our "city" she would, in speaking with any of us, imply all sorts of mean, insinuating things about her reformer-husband....

Barton, they said, met her while on one of his lecture tours....

Their baby ... a little, red object like a boiled lobster ... the anonymous, undistinguished creatures all babies are at that time--the mother used to bring it in among us and coo and coo over it so ridiculously that we made her behaviour a joke among us.

* * * * *

Barton's secretary was a beautiful, gentle, large-eyed girl ... wholly feminine ... soft-voiced ... as a reaction from the nagging of his wife, from her blatancy and utter lack of sympathy with any of his projects, he insensibly drifted into a relationship closer and closer, with this girl ... they used to take long walks into the pines together ... and be observed coming back slowly out of the sunset ... hand in hand ... to drop each other's hands, when they considered that the observing line of vision had been reached.

* * * * *

Lying under my huge army tent, by the shore of pretty little Lake Emily, I dreamed long and often, in the hush of starry midnight, of reconstructing the life of the whole world--especially the love-life between men and women.

Shelley was my God, not Christ. Shelley's notes to _Queen Mab_ were my creed, as his poetry and Whitman's furnished me my Bible. Through them I would reform the world!

I had not realised then (as Shelley did not till his death), the terrific inertia of people, their content, even, with the cramping and conventional ideas and beliefs that hold them in unconscious slavery....

I think that summer I learned Shelley and Whitman by heart.

And Keats was more than my creed. He comprised my life!

Day by day I took care of my body, gaining in weight, filling out the hollows in my face, till I had grown into a presentable young man. For the first time in my life I knew the meaning of perfect health. Every atom of my blood tingled with natural happiness as I have felt it in later days, under the stimulation of good wine.

No coffee, no tea, no beefsteak, no alcohol....

On that summer's ideal living I built the foundation of the health and strength, that, long after, I finally acquired as a permanent possession.

* * * * *

Stephen Barton and I had many interesting talks together. With the cultural background of Europe he might have been a Rousseau or a Phalanisterian. As it was, he ran a "natural life" magazine which, though crude, benefited hundreds of people. What though it showed pictures of stupid men and women revealing, in poses rivalling the contortionist, their physical development acquired through his methods.

* * * * *

We would collect many people about us, to serve as a nucleus from which the future society of men and women would expand ... we would all live together as nearly naked as possible, because that was, after all, the only pure thing ... as Art showed, in its painting and sculpture. We would make our livings by the manufacture of all sorts of exercising apparatus and health-foods....

And so the world would be leavened with the new idea ... and men and women and little children would wander forth from the great, unclean, insanitary cities and live in clusters of pretty cottages ... naked, in good weather,--in bad, clothed for warmth and comfort, but not for shame. And the human body would become holy.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the petty, local fight had started which was to disrupt this hope of Barton's, and thwart its fulfillment forever.

The town of Andersonville became jealous of the town of Cottswold because the latter handled most of the mail of our city and thereby had achieved the position of third or fourth class postoffice--I don't know exactly which.

The struggle commenced when the two lone policemen of Andersonville began to arrest us--men and women--when we walked into their town for provisions, clad in our bathing suits ... later on, we were forbidden to run for exercise, in our bathing suits, on the fine, macadamised road that passed not far from our dwellings ... it shocked the motorists.

Yet people came from far and near, just to be shocked. That seems to be the chief, most delightful, and only lawfully indulged emotion of the Puritan.

Barton summoned us to a meeting, one night, and we held a long palaver over the situation. We decided to become more cautious, in spite of a few hotheads who advised defiance to the hilt....

And the beautiful girl that possessed such fine breasts could no longer row about on our little lake, naked to the waist. And we were requested to go far in among the trees for our nude sun-baths.

The more radical of us moved entirely into the woods, despite the sand flies....

Then the affair simmered down to quietness--till the New York _World_ and the New York _Journal_ sent out their reporters.... After that, what with the lurid and insinuating stories printed, the state authorities began to look into the matter--and found no harm in us.

But the Andersonville officials were out for blood. Cottswold was growing too fast for their injured civic pride and vanity.

"Can't you divide your mail between the two towns, and make them both third or fourth class or whatever-it-is postoffice towns?" I asked Barton, after he had given me the simple explanation of the whole affair.

"No--for if I took anything away from Cottswold and added it to Andersonville, then the Cottswold authorities would become my adversaries, too ... the only thing I can do," he added, "is what I meant to do all along,--as soon as our 'city' has grown important enough--have 'Perfection City' made a postoffice."

"And then make enemies of both towns at once?"

He threw up his hands in despair and walked away.

* * * * *

Having quit work with the gang that was laying out the streets of the future city through the pines, I was entirely out of the few dollars my several weeks' work had enabled me to save ... though but little was needed to exist by, in that community of simple livers ... my procuring my tent free had rendered me quite independent....

One afternoon Barton met me on the dam-head.

"Come on in swimming with me ... I have something to talk with you about," he said.

We swam around and talked, as nonchalantly as two other men would have done, sitting in their club.

"How would you like to work for me again?"

"What is it you want me to work at?"

"I need a cook for my nature restaurant ... can you cook?"

I thought. I knew his present cook, MacGregor, the Scot, and I didn't want to do him out of a job. Besides, I didn't know how to cook.

The first objection Barton read in my face.

"MacGregor is quitting ... I'm not firing him."

"All right ... I'll take the job."

Our conference over, we had climbed out to the top of the dam, slid over, and were now standing beneath. The water galloped down in a snowy cataract of foam, as we topped off our swim with the heavy "shower-bath" that was like a massage in its pummelling.

* * * * *

MacGregor good-naturedly stayed an extra week, saying he'd show me the run of things. Secretly he tried to teach me how to cook....

As the cooking was not all of the "nature" order, but involved preparing food for a horde of people we called "outsiders" who were employed in Barton's publishing plant, I would have to prepare meat and bake bread and make tea and coffee....

Barton confessed to me that a food-compromise was distasteful to him. But he could not coerce. While lecturing about the country it was often, even with him, "eat beefsteaks or starve!"

MacGregor was a professional Scotchman, just as there are professional Irishmen, Englishmen and professional Southern Gentlemen ... every Scotchman is a professional Scotchman ... but there is always something pleasant and poetic about his being so ... it is not as it is with the others--whose "professionalism" generally bears an unpleasant reek.

MacGregor had sandy, scanty hair, a tiny white shadow of a moustache, kindly, weak eyes, a forehead prematurely wrinkled with minute, horizontal lines. Burns ... of course ... he knew and quoted every line to me. And _Sentimental Tommy_ and _Tommy and Grizel_.

* * * * *

In a week I was left in full possession of the nature restaurant.

Barton had been rendered slightly paring and mean, in matters of money,--by smooth individuals who came to him, glowing with words of what they could effect for him, in this or that project--individuals who soon decamped, leaving Barton the poorer, except in experience.

In return he had to retrench. But the retrenchments fell in the place where the penny, not the dollar, lay.

He practised economy on me. He gave me only ten dollars a week, board and room free, as cook; and also I was to wait on the diners, as well as prepare the meals.

Nevertheless the fault for having two jobs at once thrust on me, rested partly with me: when he asked me if I was able to do both, I fell into a foolish, boasting mood and said "yes."

MacGregor figured out my menu for me a week ahead, the day he left: "Anyhow, you'll only last a week," he joked.

The night before the first breakfast I lay awake all night, worrying ... hadn't I better just sneak away with daylight?... no, I must return to Mt. Hebron in the fall. Though all I wanted to return for was to show the school, that, in spite of my spindly legs, I could win my "H" in track athletics.

I must make good at this job, and save ... my grandmother, who had sent me money the previous year, I must not call on her again. And I did not count on my father ... for he was strenuously in the saddle to a grass widow, the one who had lured him to change boarding houses, and she was devouring his meagre substance like the Scriptural locust.

* * * * *

That first breakfast was a nightmare. I "practised breakfast" from three o'clock till six ... by six I had started another breakfast, and by seven, after having spoiled and burned much food, I was tolerably ready for customers ... who seemed, at that hour, to storm the place.

* * * * *

It is not necessary to go into detail. In three days I was through. And I had my first fight with Barton.

* * * * *

I was back in my army tent once more, free, with my Shelley, my Keats, my manuscript....

In despair of ever returning to Hebron, once more I lay under starry nights, dreaming poetry and comparing myself to all the Great Dead....

With the top of the tent pulled back to let the stars in, I lay beneath the gigantic, marching constellations overhead--under my mosquito netting--and wrote poems under stress of great inspiration ... at times it seemed that Shelley was with me in my tent--a slight, grey form ... and little, valiant, stocky Keats, too.

* * * * *

After my quarrel with Barton, he tried to oust me from that desirable site the Bishop's wife had turned over to me ... indeed, he tried to persuade me to leave the colony. But I would not stir.

There was a young fellow in the "City" named Vinton.... Vinton was the strong man of the place. He spent three hours every morning exercising, in minute detail, every muscle of his body ... and he had developed beautiful muscles, each one of which stood out, like a turn in a rope, of itself.

Vinton was sent to oust me, by force if need be.

I really was afraid of him when he strode up to me, as I lay there reading the _Revolt of Islam_ again.