Chapter 14

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 mediæval 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.

* * * * *