Part 14

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

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

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

X

So ended my attempt to raise up and train a new socialist writer. It is an ugly story to tell on a man--the only mean story in this amiable book, you may note. Nothing could hire me to tell it--except for a later development, which you have still to hear.

Ten years passed, and Mike was all but forgotten. I started a magazine and in it published _The Profits of Religion_, dealing with the churches by the method of economic interpretation. Mike, being now a champion of Roman Catholicism--his publishers were introducing him as “one of the most influential lay Catholics of America”--sallied forth to destroy my book. That was all right; I grant every man a right to disagree with me--the more the merrier, it is all advertising. But Mike found his task difficult, for the reason that my statements in _The Profits of Religion_ are derived from Catholic sources--devotional works, papal decrees, pastoral letters, editorials in church papers--everything with the holy imprimatur, _nihil obstat_.

So, instead of attacking the book, Mike chose to attack its author. He accused me of being a writer for gain, and headed his review with the title “A Prophet for Profit”! I have heard that charge many times, but it did seem to me there was one person in America who was barred from making it--and that was my old friend and pensioner, Michael Williams. Since he made it, and published it, it seems to me that the consequences are upon his own head. And that is why I tell the story here. I never saw him again, and never will--for he is dead.

XI

The satiric comedy _The Millennium_, which I had in my suitcase, made a hit with the leading stage impresario of that time, David Belasco. He agreed to produce it on an elaborate scale in the course of the coming winter. He was fighting the “trust” and had two big theaters in New York, where he put on two big productions every year. But after keeping me waiting for a year, and making many promises, he suddenly made peace with his enemies; he then wanted small shows that could be put on the road, so he threw over _The Millennium_ and produced _The Easiest Way_, by Eugene Walter, which had only eight characters. So vanished one more of those dreams that haunted me for ten years or more--earning a lot of money and starting another colony.

I got an advance from a publisher, and took my family to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks, rented a little camp, and settled down to the task of weaving into a novel my story of how the elder J. P. Morgan had caused the panic of the previous autumn. _The Moneychangers_ was the title. It was to be a sequel to _The Metropolis_. I was planning a trilogy to replace the one that had died with _Manassas_. My plans were still grandiloquent.

When I was gathering material for the book, Lincoln Steffens introduced me to two of my most valuable informants: Samuel Untermyer and James B. Dill. Dill had been the most highly paid corporation lawyer in Wall Street, and had recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in New Jersey. So he was free and could talk; and the stories he told me you wouldn’t believe. I will tell only one. He took me out to his home in New Jersey to spend the night, and when we came into the dining room, he said, “Make a note of this table and that window with the double French doors, I will tell you a story about them.”

This was the story. There was a lawsuit involving several million dollars, and Dill came into possession of a document that would decide the case. He wanted to make certain that this document could not be stolen. He was certain that a desperate attempt would be made to steal it, so he put two or three typists to work all day, and they made a total of twenty-one copies; he sent his office employees out to rent safe-deposit boxes in various banks in and around Wall Street. He sealed the copies in twenty-one envelopes, and one of them contained the original document. He alone knew which bank got the original. He took one of the copies out to his home that evening and said to his butler, “The house will be burglarized tonight, but don’t pay any attention to it. I want them to get what they come for.”

He set the sealed envelope on the corner of his dining-room table; sure enough, the next morning he found that the French windows had been opened and the envelope taken.

When he reached his office in the morning he called up the firm of the other side in the case and said, “By now you know what we have; our terms are two and one-half million dollars”--or whatever the amount was--and they settled on that basis. I used the story in one of my novels and, of course, everybody said it was preposterous; but it was told to me by James B. Dill.

_The Moneychangers_ did not come up to my hopes, mainly because of the unhappy situation in which I was living. My health made continuous application impossible. I beg the reader’s pardon for referring to these matters, but they are a factor in the lives of authors. I am fortunate in being able to promise a happy ending to the story--I mean that I have solved the problem of doing my work and keeping entirely well. I will tell the secrets in due course--so read on!

For recreation I climbed the mountains, played tennis, and swam in the lake. I slept in an open camp under the pine trees and conformed to all the health laws I knew. We had Irish Minnie with us, and also a woman friend of Corydon’s, a young student whom she had met at Battle Creek, very religious, a Seventh-day Adventist. Corydon was trying various kinds of mental healing, and I was hoping for anything to keep her happy while I went on solving the problems of the world.

For myself I had good company that summer; a man whom I had met two years before, at the time _The Jungle_ was published. An Englishman twelve years older than I, he had come to New York and sent me a letter of introduction from Lady Warwick, our socialist countess. H. G. Wells was the traveler’s name, and I had been obliged to tell him that I had never heard of him. He sent me his _Modern Utopia_, inscribing it charmingly, “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most hopeful.” I found it a peerless book, and wrote him a letter that he accepted as “a coronation.” I had him with me that summer in the Adirondacks by the magic of eight or ten of his early romances, the most delightful books ever made for a vacation. _Thirty Strange Stories_ was one title, and I smiled patronizingly, saying that a man could write one strange story or maybe half a dozen--but thirty! Yet there they were, and every one was strange, and I knew that I had met a great imaginative talent. Since then I have heard the highbrow critics belittle H. G. Wells; but I know that with Bernard Shaw he constituted a major period in British letters.

_The Moneychangers_ was published, and my revelations made a sensation for a week or two. The book sold about as well as _The Metropolis_, so I was ahead again--just long enough to write another book. But it seemed as if my writing days were at an end; I was close to a nervous breakdown, and had to get away from a most unhappy domestic situation and take a complete rest. Corydon wanted to have an apartment of her own in New York, and solve her own problems. My friend Gaylord Wilshire now had a gold mine, high up in the eastern slope of the Sierra mountains; also George Sterling, the poet, was begging me to come to Carmel and visit him; so I set out over the pathway of the argonauts in a Pullman car.

_7_

_Wandering_

I

It was my first trip across the American continent; and I stopped first in Chicago, to visit the stockyards after four years. There was a big hall, and a cheering crowd--the socialists having got up a mass meeting. In front of the platform sat a row of newspaper reporters, and I told them of the New York _Herald_’s investigation of conditions in the presumably reformed yards. The investigation had been made a year before, and nothing about it had appeared in the Chicago press. A good story, was it not?--I asked the reporters at the press tables, and they nodded and grinned. Yes, it was a good story; but not a line about either story or meeting appeared in any capitalist paper of Chicago next morning.

The next stop was Lawrence, Kansas, to meet the coming poet of America, as I considered him. He was a student at the state university, and I had discovered his verses in the magazines and had written to him; he had sent me batches of manuscript and poured out his heart. A real genius this time--one who wrote all day and all night, in a frenzy, just as I had done. He had gone to the university a bare-footed tramp, and now slept in an attic over a stable, wrapped in a horse blanket. He was so eager to meet me that he borrowed money, bought a railroad ticket, and boarded my train a couple of hours before it reached Lawrence; we had lunch in the diner--the first time in the poet’s life, he assured me.

When we got to town, I was escorted about and shown off, and begged to talk to a group of the students and even a professor or two. It was a great hour for the “box-car poet”; I being an object of curiosity, and he being host and impresario. We went for a walk in the country, and he told me his troubles. He had never had anything to do with a woman, but here the girls flirted with him--none of them in earnest, because he was a poor devil, and poetry was a joke compared with money. Now and then he was on the verge of suicide, but he’d be damned if he’d give them that much satisfaction. Such was Harry Kemp in his far-off day of glory; I was thirty, and he twenty-five, and the future was veiled to us both. So eager was he for my time that he borrowed more money and rode another two or three hours on the train with me.

Denver, and Ben Lindsey, judge of the Children’s Court; a new idea and a new man. I watched the court at work and sat in at a session of the Judge’s friends in the YMCA. He was in the midst of one of those political fights that came every year or two, until finally the “beast” got him. He revealed to me that he had written an account of his war with the organized corruption of Denver. I took the manuscript, read it on the train, and telegraphed _Everybody’s Magazine_ about it; they sent out Harvey O’Higgins and so got another big serial, “The Beast and the Jungle.”

The book was afterward published by Doubleday, Page and Company, and withheld from circulation--the same trick they played upon Theodore Dreiser, but never upon Upton Sinclair, you can wager! If there should ever be another crop of muckrakers in America, here is a tip they will find useful: put a clause into your contract to the effect that if at any time the publisher fails to keep the book in print and sell it to all who care to buy it, the author may have the right to the use of the plates, and print and sell an edition of his own. That makes it impossible for the publisher to “sell you out”; the would-be buyer, when he reads that clause, will realize that he is buying nothing.

A day in Ogden, Utah, with a horseback ride up the canyon; and one in Reno, Nevada, walking for hours among the irrigation ditches in the hills, and then, in the evening, watching the gambling--it was a wide-open town even in those days. A curious two-faced little city, with a fine state university, and a fashionable tone set by several hundred temporary residents from the East, seeking divorces. The Catholics and the fundamentalists of America have combined to force men and women to live together when they want to part; so here were the lawyers and the politicians of this little mining town getting rich, by selling deliverance to the lucky few who could afford a few weeks’ holiday. Corydon was talking of joining this divorce colony, so I looked the ground over with personal interest.

II

A day’s journey on the little railroad that runs behind the Sierras, through the red deserts of Nevada. In the little town of Bishop, California, the Wilshires met me, and we rode saddle horses up to the mine, eighteen miles in the mountains. A high valley with Bishop Creek running through, towering peaks all about, and cold, clear lakes--the first snows of the year were falling, and trout had quit biting, but I climbed the peaks, and ate large meals in the dining room with the miners. The camp was run on a basis of comradeship, with high wages and plenty of socialist propaganda; we slept in a rough shack and in the evenings discussed the mine with the superintendent and foreman and assayer. These were old-time mining men, and they were of one accord that here was the greatest gold mine in America. You could see the vein, all the way up the mountainside, and down in the workings you could knock pieces off the face and bring them up and have them assayed before your eyes.

But alas, there were complications in quartz mining beyond my understanding. Most of the vein was low-grade, and it could only be made to pay if worked on a large scale. Wilshire did not have the capital to work it in that way, and in the effort to get the money, he bled himself and thousands of readers of his magazine who had been brought to share his rosy hopes. I stood by him through that long ordeal, and know that he did everything--except to turn the mine over to some of the big capitalist groups that sought to buy it and freeze out the old stockholders. Ultimately, of course, the big fellows got it.

Socialists ought not to fool with money-making schemes in capitalist society. I have heard that said a hundred times, and I guess it is right; but there is something to be noted on the other side. The socialists of America have never been able to maintain an organ of propaganda upon a national scale; the country is too big, and the amount of capital required is beyond their resources. The _Appeal to Reason_ was a gift to them from a real-estate speculator with a conscience, old J. A. Wayland--may the managers of the next world be pitiful to him. (His enemies set a trap for him, baited with a woman; he crossed a state line in her company, which is a prison offense in our pious America, and when he got caught, he blew out his brains.) _Wilshire’s Magazine_ was a gift from a billboard advertising man with a sense of humor. So long as his money lasted, we all took his gift with thanks; if his gold-mining gamble had succeeded, we would all have made money, and had a still bigger magazine, and everything would have been lovely. But my old friend Gay died in a hospital in New York, all crippled up with arthritis. I missed his fertile mind and his sly, quiet smile.

III

On to Carmel, a town that boasts more scenery to the square mile than any other place I know; a broad beach, bordered by deep pine woods and flanked by rocky headlands; at one side a valley, with farms, a river running through it and mountains beyond. Fifty years ago the place was owned by a real-estate speculator of the Bohemian Club type; that is to say, a person with the art bug who would donate a lot to any celebrity who would confer the honor of his presence. Needless to say, George Sterling, the Bohemian Club’s poet laureate, had his pick of lots, and a bungalow on a little knoll by the edge of a wood remote from traffic and “boosting.”

George was at this time forty, but showed no signs of age. He was tall and spare, built like an Indian, with a face whose resemblance to Dante had often been noted. When he was with the roistering San Francisco crew he drank, but when he was alone he lived the life of an athlete in training; he cut wood, hunted, walked miles in the mountains, and swam miles in the sea. A charming companion, tenderhearted as a child, bitter only against cruelty and greed; incidentally a fastidious poet, aloof and dedicated.

His friend Arnold Genthe gave me the use of a cottage, and there I lived alone for two or three months of winter, in peace and happiness unknown to me for a long time. I had been reading the literature of the health cranks, and had resolved upon a drastic experiment; I would try the raw-food diet, for which so much was promised. I ate two meals a day, of nuts, fruits, olives, and salad vegetables; the only cooked food being two or three shredded-wheat biscuits or some graham crackers. The diet agreed with me marvelously, and for the entire period I never had an ache or pain. So I was triumphant, entirely overlooking the fact that I was doing none of the nerve-destroying labor of creative writing. I was reading, walking, riding horseback, playing tennis, meeting with George and other friends; if I had done that all my life I might never have had an ache or pain.

In Oakland was the Ruskin Club, an organization of socialist intellectuals, who wanted to give a dinner and hear me make a speech. George and I went up to town, and George stopped in the Bohemian Club, and stood in front of the bar with his boon companions; I stood with him and drank a glass of orange juice, as is my custom. Then we set out for the ferry, George talking rapidly, and I listening in a strange state of uncertainty. I couldn’t understand what George was saying, and I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until we got to Oakland that I realized what was the matter; my California Dante was drunk. When we got to the dinner, someone who knew him better than I took him off and walked him around the block and fed him bromo-seltzers; the socialist poem he had written for the occasion had to be read by someone else.

I went back to Carmel alone, feeling most sorrowful. I was used to my poor old father getting drunk, and some of my other men relatives, but this was the first time I had ever seen a great mind distorted by alcohol. I wrote George a note, telling him that I was leaving Carmel because I could not be happy there. George came running over to my place at once, and with tears in his eyes pleaded forgiveness. He swore that he had had only two drinks; it was because he had taken them on an empty stomach. But I knew that sort of drinker’s talk, and it did not move me. Then he swore that if I would stay, he would not touch another drop while I was in California. That promise I accepted, and he kept it religiously. Many a time I have thought my best service to letters might have been to stay right there the rest of my days!

That Ruskin Club dinner was a quaint affair. Frederick Irons Bamford, assistant librarian of the Oakland Public Library, had organized the group and ran it with a firm hand. I think he must have been a Sunday-school superintendent before he came into the socialist movement; he shepherded the guests in just that way, telling us exactly what to do at each stage, and we did it with good-natured laughter. There were songs printed for us to sing, each at the proper moment; there were speeches, poems, announcements in due order. “And now,” said our shepherd, “we will have ten minutes of humor. Will some one kindly tell a funny story?”

A man arose, and said, “I will tell you a story that nobody can understand.” The two or three hundred banqueters pricked up their ears, of course, and prepared to meet the challenge. I have tried out this “story that nobody can understand” on several audiences, and it always “goes,” so I give you a chance at it. Said the man at the banquet: “I wish to explain that this is not one of those silly jokes where you look for a point but there is no point. This is a really funny story, and you would laugh heartily if you could understand it, but you can’t. I will ask you, if you are able to see the point, to raise your hand, so that we can count you.” He told the story, and a silence followed; all the people craned their necks to see if there was any hand up. Finally several did go up, I forget how many. We all had a good laugh, and it was really ten minutes of humor. The story was as follows:

Mrs. Jones goes into her grocer’s and asks for a dozen boxes of matches. Says the grocer: “Why, Mrs. Jones, you had a dozen boxes of matches yesterday!” Says Mrs. Jones: “Oh, yes, but you see, my husband is deaf and dumb, and he talks in his sleep.”

Raise your hand!

IV

Tramping the hills and forests and beaches of Carmel, riding horseback over the Seventeen Mile Drive, there began to haunt my brain a vision of a blank-verse tragedy; the story of a child of the coal mines who is adopted by rich people and educated, and finally becomes a leader of social revolution. The first act was set in the depths of the mine, a meeting between the rich child and the poor one, a fairy scene haunted by the weird creatures who people the mine boy’s fancy as he sits all day in the darkness, opening and closing a door to let the muleteams through. The second act was to happen in utopia, being the young hero’s vision of a world in which he played the part of a spiritual leader. The third act was in the drawing room of a Fifth Avenue mansion, whose windows looked out upon the street where the hero leads the mob to his own death.

The verses of this to me marvelous drama would come rolling through my mind like breakers on the Carmel strand; but in the interest of health I put off writing them, and soon they were gone forever. I suppose it is natural that I should think of this drama as the greatest thing I ever had hold of--on the principle that the biggest fish is the one that got away. Curiously enough, the main feature of the second act was to be an invention whereby the hero was to be heard by the whole world at once. Such was my concept of utopia; and now, more than half a century later, the people of my home town sit all evening and listen to the wonders of the Hair-Again Hair Restorer, and the bargains in Two-Pants Suits at Toots, the Friendly Tailor; every now and then there is a “hookup” of a hundred or two stations, whereby all America sees and hears the batterings of two bruisers; or maybe the Jazz-Boy Babies, singing; or maybe the “message” of some politician seeking office.