Part 16

_The Naturewoman_, like all my plays, had no success. It was published in the volume _Plays of Protest_ a couple of years later, and had no sale. Not long thereafter, the students of Smith College, studying drama under Samuel Eliot, gave it in New York, and these emancipated young ladies found it charmingly quaint and old-fashioned; they played it in a vein of gentle farce. Apparently it never occurred to them that the author might have meant it that way. I have frequently observed that an advocate of new ideas is not permitted to have a sense of humor; that is apparently reserved for persons who have no ideas at all. For fifty-six years I have been ridiculed for a passage in _The Jungle_ that deals with the moral claims of dying hogs--which passage was intended as hilarious farce. The New York _Evening Post_ described it as “nauseous hogwash”--and refused to publish my letter of explanation.

Corydon had come to Fairhope for a while, and then had gone north on affairs of her own; it had been arranged that she was to get a divorce from me. I thought that a novel about modern marriage that would show the possibility of a couple’s agreeing to part, and still remaining friends, would be interesting and useful. So I began _Love’s Pilgrimage_. In the spring I came north and took up my residence in another single-tax colony, at Arden, Delaware, founded and run by Frank Stephens, a sculptor of Philadelphia; a charming place about twenty miles from the big city, with many little cabins and bungalows scattered on the edge of the woods. Frank was glad to have me come--and alas, a year and a half later he was gladder to have me go! For the Philadelphia newspapers found me out, and thereafter, in the stories that appeared about Arden, socialism was more prominent than single tax, and I was more prominent than the founder. This was my misfortune, not my fault. I wanted nothing but to be let alone to write my book; but fate and the editors ruled otherwise.

XII

No bungalows being available in the neighborhood, I rented a lot and installed my ménage in three tents. Corydon, feeling it not yet convenient to get her divorce, occupied one of the tents, on a strictly literary basis. David had a troop of children to run all over the place with, and I had the book in which I was absorbed. It was turning out to be longer than I had planned--something that has frequently happened to my books.

The single-tax utopia, technically known as an enclave, had been founded by a group of men who were sick of grime, greed and strain, and fled away to a legend, the Forest of Arden. Some had a few dollars and could stay all the time; others went up to Philadelphia and were slaves in the daytime. On Saturday evenings they built a campfire in the woodland theater, sang songs and recited, and now and then gave _Robin Hood_ or _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. On holidays they would get up a fancy pageant and have a dance in the barn at night, and people would actually have a good time without getting drunk. One anarchist shoemaker was the only person who drank in Arden, so far as I know, and he has long since gone the way of drinkers.

Personally, I was never much for dressing up--not after the age of six or so, when my mother had made me into a baker boy for a fancy-dress party. But I liked to watch others more free of care; also I liked to have young fellows who would play tennis in the afternoon. There was Donald Stephens, son of the founder, and there were several of the children of Ella Reeve Bloor. One of these, Hal Ware, was my opponent in the finals of a tournament--I won’t say how it turned out! After the Russian Revolution, Hal went over in charge of the first American tractor unit; an odd turn of fate, that a dweller in the Forest of Arden should carry to the peasants of the steppes the dream of a utopia based upon machinery! Don Stephens served a year in the Delaware state prison as a conscientious objector to war, and then helped at the New York end of the Russian tractor work.

Also there was a young professor of the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Nearing--a mild liberal, impatient with my socialistic theories. Did my arguments make any impression on him? I never knew; but in time he was kicked out of the university, and then he traveled beyond me and called me the only revolutionist left in the Socialist Party. There was Will Price, Philadelphia architect, genial and burly--what a glorious Friar Tuck he made, or was it the Sheriff of Nottingham? No doubt he sits now in the single taxers’ heaven, engaged in a spirited debate with William Morris over the former’s theory of a railroad right of way owned by the public, with anybody allowed to run trains over it! Will had the misfortune to fall in love with my secretary, and she was in love with someone else; a mixup that will happen even in utopia.

Corydon was corresponding with the young lady from the Delta district of Mississippi--who had fasted and gained weight, according to my recommendation. She had then gone home, taking along a “health crank” nurse; she had put her father and mother on a fast, and to the horror of the local doctors, had cured them of “incurable” diseases. Now this Miss Kimbrough was writing a book, _The Daughter of the Confederacy_, dealing with the tragic life story of Winnie Davis, daughter of Jefferson Davis. Winnie had fallen in love with a Yankee, had been forced to renounce him, and had died of a broken heart. Judge Kimbrough had been Mrs. Davis’ lawyer, and had fallen heir to the Davis heirlooms and letters. Mary Craig Kimbrough now wrote that she needed someone to advise her about the book, and Corydon went south to help her with the manuscript.

David and I put a stove in our tents and prepared to hibernate in the snowbound Forest of Arden. How many of the so-called necessities men can dispense with when they have to! Once I was asked to drive a youthful guest a couple of miles in a car, so that he might find a barber and get a shave; I was too polite to tell this guest that I had never been shaved by a barber in my life. In New York I heard another young man of delicate rearing

lament the fact that the servant did not always remember to draw the water for his bath; I was tempted to narrate how I bathed every morning of that winter in Arden with water in a tin washbasin and a newspaper spread upon a tent floor. I remember our Christmas turkey, which we hung up outside in the cold; we cooked it joint by joint, hung by a wire inside the little round wood stove. Nobody’s turkey ever tasted better.

When Mitchell Kennerley accepted _Love’s Pilgrimage_, and paid me an advance of twelve hundred and fifty dollars, I decided to build a house on my single-tax lot at the edge of the Forest of Arden. Frank Stephens was the builder, and I didn’t hold it against him that, like all other builders, he underestimated the cost. It came to twenty-six hundred dollars and kept me scratching for quite a while. I was contributing articles to _Physical Culture_ at a hundred and fifty dollars a month, which provided my living.

The little two-story cottage was completed early in the spring of 1911. It was painted brown on the outside, and stained on the inside. There was a living room in front with an open fireplace and a chimney that smoked. High on the wall, a shelf ran all the way round and held most of my books. In the rear was one small bedroom, and a still smaller kitchen, plus a bathroom without plumbing. Upstairs was an attic that I planned some day to make into two rooms. We moved in, feeling most luxurious after the tents. Next door was a one-room cabin belonging to Scott Nearing; I rented it for a study, and so had everything of a material nature that a man of letters could desire.

The Forest of Arden turned green again, and put flower carpets on its floor, and the tennis court was rolled and marked, and everything was jolly. The young people were preparing _The Merchant of Venice_, and the Esperantists of America held a convention in the big barn; I studied that language for three weeks, and when I went to supper at the inn I would say, _“Mi desiras lo puddingo”_--at least that is the way I recall it after fifty years. I was writing a sequel to _Love’s Pilgrimage_, which I completed but have never published.

Unknown to me, the fates had been weaving a net about my life; and now they were ready to draw it tight. Corydon wrote that Mary Craig Kimbrough was coming to New York to talk with a publisher who had read her life of Winnie Davis, and that she, Corydon, was coming with her. Also there came a letter from Harry Kemp, saying that he was finishing at the university, and was then going to “beat” his way east and visit Arden. George Sterling was on his way from California to New York--he too was to be tied up in that net!

There was an odd development, which served as a sort of curtain raiser to the main tragedy. A little discussion club got into a dispute with George Brown, the anarchist shoemaker. The club members were accustomed to hold meetings in the outdoor theater, and Brown would come and air his opinions on the physiology of sex. The women and girls didn’t like it. They asked him to shut up, but he stood on the elemental right of an anarchist to say anything anywhere at any time. He broke up several meetings--until finally the executives of the club went to Wilmington and swore out a warrant for his arrest for disturbing the peace.

That, of course, brought the newspaper reporters, and put my picture in the papers again. I had had nothing to do with the discussion club or with the arrest of Brown, but I lived in Arden and was part of the scenery. The anarchist was sentenced to five days on the rockpile at the state prison; he came back boiling with rage and plotting a dire revenge: he would have all the members of the baseball team arrested for playing on Sunday, and _they_ would have a turn on the rockpile! He would add Upton Sinclair, who had been playing tennis on Sunday, and thus would punish Arden by putting it on the front page of every newspaper in America. He carried out this scheme, and eleven of us were summoned to court, and under a long-forgotten statute, dating from 1793, were sentenced to eighteen hours on the rockpile. This made one of the funniest newspaper stories ever telegraphed over the world--you may find the details in _The Brass Check_ if you are curious. What the anarchist shoemaker did not realize, and what nobody else realized, was that he was setting the stage and assembling the audience for the notorious Sinclair-Kemp divorce scandal. The fates were against me.

_8_

_Exile_

I

The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes now to its painful climax. They had been married for eleven years, and for the last seven or eight had realized that they were mismated. They talked much of divorce, and according to accepted conventions, Corydon was the one to get it. But the world made divorce difficult and placed handicaps upon a divorced woman; so Corydon kept hesitating, taking one step forward and two steps back.

If this story belonged to Thyrsis alone, he would tell it all, on the theory that the past is past and never returns, and the only use we can make of blunders is to help others in avoiding them. But the story is Corydon’s also, and Corydon found herself a new husband and a new life, and has long since retired from the limelight.

Thyrsis, an unhappily married man, bore among his friends the reputation of being “puritanical”; a onetime virtue that now ranks as a dangerous disease. About the bedside of the patient gather the psychoanalysts and up-to-the-minute “intellectuals”; they take his temperature, or lack of it, and shake their heads anxiously over his subnormal condition. Jack London was much worried about Thyrsis and wrote warning letters; but in the course of time, Jack’s own theories brought him to a situation where he could not have his wife and another woman at the same time, and so he voluntarily removed himself from the world. Then Frank Harris took over the case of Thyrsis and prescribed for the patient a tempestuous love affair. No man can become a great novelist without one, it seems, nor can a modern autobiography be worthy of suppression by the police unless it contains several adulteries per volume.

Let the fact be recorded that Thyrsis was capable of falling in love, and if he did not do it frequently, it was because he had so many other matters on his mind. There is a story having to do with this period, which ought to be told because of the satisfaction it will bring to the lovers of love, and to those who dislike the puritanical Thyrsis and will be pleased to see him “get his.”

It was the winter of 1910-11, when Corydon had gone south, having once more decided upon a divorce. Thyrsis was a free man, so he thought--and, incidentally, a lonely and restless one. He was thirty-two at this time, and went up to New York to attend a gathering in Carnegie Hall, where the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was acting as host to Victor Berger, socialist Congressman-elect. Thyrsis came early, and in one of the aisles came face to face with a lovely young woman of twenty-one or two, wearing the red badge of an usher. In those observant eyes and that frank open countenance was revealed something he had been seeking for a long time; there was a mental flash, and the two moved automatically toward each other. Said she, without hesitation: “You are Thyrsis?” Said he: “You are Inez Milholland?”

A Vassar girl, with a wealthy father, Inez had joined the Socialist Party and had become an active suffragette--all of which, of course, made a sensation in the newspapers. That evening, after the meeting, Thyrsis went with her to her hotel, and they sat in the lobby conversing until three o’clock in the morning, when the place was deserted by all but the night watchman. What did they not talk about, in the vast range of the socialist and suffrage movements in America, and in England, where Inez had been to school; the people they knew, the books they had read, the events that the future held behind its veil!

“I never met anyone I could talk to so easily,” said Thyrsis; and Inez returned the compliment. “But don’t fall in love with me,” she added. When he asked, “Why not?” she answered, “I am already in love, and you would only make yourself unhappy.” Later, she told him that she too was unhappy; it was a married man, and she would not break up another woman’s home but would only eat her heart out. Again that old, old story that Heine sings, and for which neither socialists nor suffragists have any remedy!

_Es ist eine alte Geschichte_ _Doch klingt sie immer neu._

Inez desired to meet Berger, and he came next morning. The three of us went for a drive and had lunch at the Claremont. We spent the afternoon walking in the park, then had dinner at the hotel, and spent the evening together, solving all the problems of human society. It was another intellectual explosion, this time _à trois_. Said the socialist Congressman: “Thyrsis, if it wouldn’t be that I am a family man, I would run away with that girl so quick you would never see her once again.” Thyrsis repeated that to Inez, who smiled and said, “He is mistaken; it is not like that.”

Thyrsis disregarded the sisterly advice that had been given to him. He fell in love--with such desperate and terrifying violence as he had never conceived possible in his hard-working, sober life. He understood for the first time the meaning of that ancient symbol of the little archer with the bow and arrow. Commonplace as the metaphor seemed, there was no other to be used; it was like being shot--a convulsive pain, a sense of complete collapse, an anguish repeated, day after day, without any respite or hope of it.

He could not give up. It seemed to him that here was the woman who had been made for him, and the thought that he had to lose her was not to be borne. He would go back to Arden and write letters--such mad, wild, pain-distracted letters as would satisfy the most exacting intellectual, the most implacable hater of Puritans! Inez afterward assured him that she had destroyed these letters, which was kind of her. She was always kind, and straightforward, saying what she meant, as men and women will do in utopia.

The storm passed, as storms do, and new life came to Thyrsis. Four years afterward he met Inez Milholland again. She was now married, and it seemed to Thyrsis that the world had laid its paralyzing hand upon her; she was no longer simple, in the manner of the early gods. Was it that the spell was broken? Or was it that Thyrsis had an abnormal dislike for fashionable costumes, large picture hats, and long jade earrings? Another two years, and Inez, a suffrage politician, came out to California and broke her heart trying to carry the state for Hughes, on the theory that he would be more generous to the cause than Woodrow Wilson. This was supposed to be strategy, but to Thyrsis it seemed insanity. In any case, what a melancholy descent from the young ardors of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society! She died of exhaustion.

II

The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes to an end in the year 1911. George Sterling was coming from California, Harry Kemp from Kansas; Mary Craig Kimbrough was in New York to consult with a publisher, and Corydon had come with her.

George Sterling, the day of his arrival, came to call upon Corydon in her father’s home. There he met the young lady from Mississippi and promptly fell upon his knees before her, after the fashion of romantic poets, even after they are forty. She was pale from a winter’s labor over manuscript, and George called her a “star in alabaster” and other extravagant things that moved her to merry laughter. Later on, Thyrsis met the couple walking on the street and stopped to greet them. Said Thyrsis matter-of-factly: “You don’t look well, Craig. Really, you look like a skull!” George raged, “I am going to kill that man some day!” But Craig replied, “There is the first man in the world who ever told me the truth.”

George Sterling, an unhappily married man, wanted to marry Craig. She told him, “I can never love any man.” When he demanded to know the reason, she told him that her heart had been broken by an early love affair at home; she knew she would never love again. But the poet could not accept that statement; he began writing sonnets to her--more than a hundred in the course of the next year. Eighteen years later it was my sad duty to edit these _Sonnets to Craig_ for publication, and they were received by the high-brow literary world with some uncertainty. They have a fatal defect--it is possible to understand what they mean. Literary tastes move in cycles, and just now poetry lovers are impressed by eccentricities of language and punctuation. But the day will come when they care about real feelings, expressed in musical language, and then they will thrill to such lines as these:

All gracious things, and delicate and sweet, Within the spaces of thy beauty meet

And again:

Sweet in this love are terrors that beguile And joys that make a hazard of my breath.

And again:

Stand back from me! Have mercy for a space, Lest madness break thine image in my mind!

In connection with this unhappy love affair, there was another curious tangle of circumstances. The girlhood sweetheart of Craig in the Far South had brought to her a poem so sad that it had moved her to tears, and she had carried it ever since in her memory. “The Man I Might Have Been” was its title--the grief-stricken cry of those who fall into the trap of John Barleycorn. Now here was the author of that poem, in love with the same woman; and both the unhappy suitors--the Southern boy and the crowned poet of California--were fated to end their lives by their own hands, and those of John Barleycorn.

Thyrsis was invited up to New York to give advice about the life of Winnie Davis. It was April and happened to be warm, so he wore tennis shoes because they were comfortable; to make up for this informality he added kid gloves--which seemed to Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi the funniest combination ever heard of. She said nothing, being the soul of politeness; but her lively red-brown eyes took in everything. She was learning about these strange new creatures called radicals, and their ideas, some of which appeared sensible and others crazy. Watching Thyrsis, she thought, “The funny, funny man!” She watched him, thinking the same thought for a matter of half a century; but she did not always have to be polite about it.

Corydon, Thyrsis, and Craig settled themselves in the little cottage on the edge of the Forest of Arden. Springtime had come, and the Arden folk were giving _Midsummer Night’s Dream_; Corydon was Titania, in yellow tights and a golden crown. At this juncture came Harry Kemp, having completed another year at the University of Kansas; he was lugging two suitcases full of books and manuscripts, plus an extra blue shirt and a pair of socks. There was a girl at Arden who was a lover of poetry, and Thyrsis, fond matchmaker, had the idea that the poet might become interested in this girl. But the fates had other plans, and were not slow to reveal them. Corydon was interested in the poet.

It was during this time that Harry Kemp wrote a sonnet to Thyrsis and handed it to him with the words, “You may publish this some day.” It will not be ranked as a great sonnet, but it is curious as a part of the story; so, after Harry’s death, his permission is accepted.

Child, wandering down the great world for a day And with a child’s soul seeing thru and thru The passing prejudice to Truth’s own view. Immortal spirit robed in mortal day, Striving to find and follow the one way That is your way, none other’s--to be true To that which makes a sincere man of you! Still be yourself, and let tongues say their say!

Still fling the seed with daring hand abroad, And, then, mayhap, the Race to come will be Gladdened, with ripened fruit and bursting pod Of Love, and Brotherhood, and Liberty-- Open to Nature and Her Laws from God As spreading gulfs lie open to the Sea!

III