Chapter 30

I walked, with a guilty feeling of too much sentimentality, back into the "stack" at the university library. I took down book after book of the great English poets, and pressed my cheek to them in long farewell ... first glancing cautiously around, to be sure that no one was near to observe my actions....

I did not say good-bye to Langworth or my other professor friends, as they had already left for their summer vacations.

* * * * *

I sat in Joe Deacon's room, talking, that last night of my sojourn in Laurel....

"Good old Joe" we called him, because he was possessed of all the old-fashioned virtues, and unassumingly lived up to them. He was a fellow member of the Scoop Club, an associate teacher in the School of Journalism, and taught during the summer session....

Long, long Joe and I talked ... of everything young idealists discuss or dream of. We ended with a discussion of the sex question. I reiterated what he already had heard me say, that I had had so far no sex experience. He confessed that he, also, had had none ... maintained that a decent man should wait, if he expected a woman to come pure to him....

I spoke ardently in favour of free love.

He assented that, theoretically, it was the thing ... but there were a multitude of practical difficulties that made for favour of the convention of marriage....

"No, if a convention is wrong, it is the duty of everyone who knows the right in his heart, to help smash that convention...."

"You just wait," I boasted imaginatively, "and I'll show you!" "Maybe, Joe," I concluded, for I knew what I said would tease him, "maybe, when I reach the East, I shall break loose." Then I added--and to this day I cannot imagine what put it into my head to say it--what fantastic curl of thought, unless perhaps a premonition of what was soon to come to pass--

"Penton Baxter has invited me to pay him a visit at Eden, a Single Tax Colony just outside of Philadelphia, before I go on to Europe via cattleboat ... maybe I'll take him up, go down there, and run away with his wife ... she's a mighty pretty woman, Joe!"

Joe was scandalised at my remark--the effect I had wished for.

* * * * *

But after the uproar broke, Joe stoutly maintained that our elopement had all been a frame-up, alleging his conversation with me as proof ... as who would have not?

* * * * *

Reduced again to my barest equipment, and having left as my forwarding address the office of the _National Magazine_, in New York, I hopped a freight shortly after dawn. It was a fast, through freight. Because of lack of practice I boarded it clumsily, and almost went to my death under its grinding, roaring wheels, there in the Laurel freight-yards. I sat, trembling with the shock to my nerves, on the bumpers.

I hopped off at Argentine, just outside of Kansas City.

I found a camp of tramps and joined with them. We drank coffee together....

But, somehow, the scales had fallen from my eyes. My old idealisation of the life of the tramp, somehow or other, was entirely gone--an idealisation that had, anyhow, been mainly literary, induced by the writings of Jack London, Josiah Flynt and Maxim Gorky.

Now, as I listened to their filthy talk ... their continual "Jesus-Christ'-ing" over everything they said, I grew sick of them. I got up and walked away stiffly--never again to be a tramp.

The reporter of the _Star_, who covered the stockyards, took me to a little sturdy cattle merchant, who agreed to ship me to New York, in care of five carloads of calves ... for a fee of ten dollars. I persuaded him that I would mail him that ten on arrival at my point of destination ... I have never done so ... when I had it, I needed it more for myself ... and, anyhow, I earned that ten.

* * * * *

My duties with the calves were not many ... merely to walk along the sides of the five cars in my keeping, and see that the calves kept on their legs and did not sprawl over each other ... sometimes one of them would get crushed against the side of the car, and his leg would protrude through the slats. And I would push his leg back, to keep it from being broken ... I made my rounds every time the freight came to a halt.

There were other cars, filled with steers, sheep, and pigs.

Each kind of animal behaved according to its nature, during the trip. The steers soon accepted their cramped, moving life rather stolidly. The calves acted as if dumbfounded, in stupefied, wide-eyed innocence ... the sheep huddled as sheep do ... but the big fat porkers were the most intelligent ... like intelligent cowards that fully know their fate, they piled in heaping, screaming, frenzied masses ... in scrambling heaps in the centre of their cars ... suffocating, stinking, struggling closer and closer together and leaving great, bare areas unoccupied on either end....

"A pig has no sense in a car ... or anywhere."

"Seems to me they have ... they act as if they know what they're in for, at the other end of the line."

"By golly, that's true! I never thought of it that way before!"

So conversed the head brakeman and I.

My calves soon grew to know me. They bleated, in a friendly manner, as I walked by, overseeing them, when the freight stopped.

* * * * *

We had bumped along as far as Buffalo. There the stock were driven down an incline into yards fenced in with white-washed boards, for their second rest, required by law,--before launching on the last leg of their journey down the middle of New York State, and along the Hudson ... consigned to Stern and Company of New York....

Some of them were to be butchered there and afford apartment-dwellers lamb stew, tenderloins, and pork chops ... others to be driven aboard cattleboats, for Europe....

* * * * *

At Buffalo I was ripe for a change. Also I wished to pick up threads of former experiences and acquaintanceships ... to have a good gossip about the Eos Art Community ... I called up Laston Meunier who had been at Eos and whom I had first met there ... who loved bohemian ways, and welcomed wandering artistic and literary folk at his home in Buffalo.

"Where are you now?" Laston asked, over the phone.

"I'm calling you from the stockyards," and I told him what I was doing....

"Come on up to my house, and forget your five carloads of calves ... they can weather through the last jump, to New York, alone ... what does it matter?... they're going to be butchered in a few days."

Looking about this way and that, to make sure I was unseen, I took my grip in my hand, hopped aboard a street car outside the stockyards, and abandoned my calves to their destiny.

Meunier welcomed me. He invited me to stay at his house for several weeks. His pretty, young wife, smiling whimsically, showed me to a room she had already set in dainty order for me.

* * * * *

Meunier had gone to his office....

Nichi Swartzman, the tall Japanese genius, showed up, and Bella Meunier, Nichi, and I ate breakfast together.

Swartzman was, and is, a magnificent talker ... a torch of inspiration burned brightly in his brain, with continual conversational fire.

But he must have his drink. Several of them. Which Laston's wife poured for him abundantly.

After breakfast I sprawled on the floor ... I always sprawl on floors instead of sitting in chairs....

Swartzman and Bella Meunier and I talked and talked and talked ... of Poe ... of Baudelaire, of Balzac....

Then Nichi launched forth on a long disquisition on Japanese and Chinese art, and Mrs. Meunier and I gladly remained silent during the whole morning, enchanted by the vistas of beauty which Swartzman's words opened for us.

"Why," I thought, "must such a man lack audiences? If civilisation were in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is _alive_. His fire wakes kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching to the corpse-minded, the dead-hearted? like so many of our professors and teachers!"

I found out afterward that Nichi Swartzman was utterly irresponsible as he was brilliant.

* * * * *

Laston Meunier dug up poor old Fritz Von Hammer, the former Eos pianist--whose breath was still as fetid as ever ... who still insisted on seizing you by the coat lapel and talking right into your nose--dug him up from the moving picture house, where he played.

Von Hammer wept over the piano, as he found himself free again to play as he wished....

The party was in my honour. There were present about a dozen guests, picked from Buffalo's bohemia. They sat about on the floor on cushions.

Swartzman recited Poe's Black Cat, with gestures and facial contortions that were terrifying. His huge, yellow, angular Japanese face grimacing near the ceiling ... he was six foot six, if anything....

His recitation was done so well that, when he had finished, we sat, for a moment, in frightened silence, like children. Then we stormed him with applause.

"Now play the Danse Macabre," cried Nichi, to Von Hammer....

"I can't do it without a violin accompaniment."

"Try it for me ... and I shall dance the Dance of Death for you."

Von Hammer said he would do his best ... after much persuasion and a few more drinks....

And Nichi Swartzman danced....

We saw, though we did not know it, the origin of modern futurist dancing there. Nichi danced with his street clothes on ... wearing his hat, in ghoulish rakishness, tipped down over his eyes ... inter-wreathing his cane with his long, skeletal, twisting legs and arms ... his eyes gleaming cat-like through merest slits....

At three o'clock in the morning we were all drunk. Before we parted we joined in singing shakily but enthusiastically _Down in Bohemia Land_.

* * * * *

Meunier, fulfilling his promise to me, paid my fare to New York. I soon walked into the office of the _National Magazine_.

Clara Martin was there, and Allsworth Lephil, the managing editor, and his assistant Galusha Siddon.

As I sat in the office, they gave me a sort of impromptu reception.

Ray Sanford strolled in, as fresh-complexioned as an Englishman. He was, they said, preparing a series of articles on the negro problem. And I met a little, bustling, sharp-eyed man, with much of the feminine about him,--his face lifted as if on an intuitive intellectual scent.... Carruthers Heflin ... he wore a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, like a stage-doctor. He was busy with a series of articles to be entitled, _Babylons of To-day_ ... exposing the corruption of our modern American cities.

I spoke to them of my projected trip to Europe.

"I think you're foolish to run off to Europe just at this time in your life. Now is the time you should establish yourself here. Besides, Jarvis Mackworth has written us that you're writing a book while Derek, the Chicago millionaire, stakes you."

"Yes, that's true. But couldn't I write it in Europe as well as here?"

"You'd find too many distractions."

"Where would you go first?" asked Clara Martin.

"Paris!"

"That would be absolutely fatal for a young man of your disposition. You need to sit quiet and write for a few years ... you've been over the map too much already."

"Baxter has just been in here ... he's writing us a sensational novel exposing society. He spoke to me about you," Lephil remarked,--"said he wished we'd put a tag on you and ship you down to his Eden colony."

There was a pause. Miss Martin thoughtfully tapped her forehead with a pencil.

"I don't think it would be good for Johnnie to go down to Eden and put up with Penton," she interjected, "they're too much alike."

"Ally Merton is in New York," Galusha Siddon informed me. "He's working on the _Express_. He wants you to run down and see him."

* * * * *

Merton had come to New York the year before, to work on the _Express_. Mackworth had gotten him the job. Ally was as meticulously dressed as ever. His eyes swept me from head to foot, with an instinctive glance of appraisal, as he shook hands.

"Come on up on the roof. The paper wants a photo of you ... to go with a story I'm writing about you."

* * * * *

I rather resented all my friends' way of talking to me, as if I were a child to be discussed, ordered about, and disposed of. But I humoured them by playing up to their patronising spirit ... even playing horse with them continually on the sly, and having lots of fun that they didn't suspect.

* * * * *

The next morning I was in the office of the _Independent_, visiting with the literary editor, good old Dr. William Hayes Ward. He was a man of eighty years ... a scholar in English and the Greek and Latin classics....

Once, when on a vacation he had written me that, as pastime, he had read the whole of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ over again. In the Greek, of course.

His abused eyes floated uneasily behind a double pair of lenses ... a dissenting minister ... of the old school ... he seemed to me far more youthful, more invigorating, than any of my other more youthful friends in the literary and magazine world.

We talked and talked of poetry. He brought down a huge treatise on English versification, translated from some German scholar's life-research--to prove a point ... he discussed what Sidney Lanier--whom he had known--might have done with metrics, had he only lived longer....

And "no ... no ... take my advice," he said, "don't go down to Eden." There was something so vaguely deprecatory in his voice that it brought from me the question--"why not? isn't Penton Baxter all right?"

"Oh, yes," in the same deprecatory tone,--"he's all right enough, alone--but, together, you'd be like two balloons without ballast. He might get you, or you might get him, into some sort of mess."

"Why Dr. Ward, what do you mean?"

"Penton is always protesting about something or other,--always starting fantastic schemes ... he's just finished with his Parnassus Palace experiment, which brought him a lot of newspaper notoriety ... which is to me distasteful, extremely distasteful ... yet Baxter," he added hastily, "is a real force ... he can think of more original projects in a given space of time than anyone else I know."

"I look on him as a great and wonderful man!"

"Mark my word, Mr. Gregory, you'll find yourself in some sort of mix-up if you go down to Eden to live with him. You're both too mad and inflammable to be in the same neighbourhood."

Using all his powers of persuasion, Dr. William Hayes Ward tried to explain to me how I owed it both to Mr. Derek and Mr. Mackworth to finish my play.

"Have you no place else to go to, beside Eden?"

"I could run out to Perfection City--and camp out there."

"Now that's a good idea ... why not try that?"

* * * * *

"Johnnie, had your lunch yet?" it was Dr. Percival Hammond, the managing editor, who was asking, leaning out from his cubbyhole where he sat before his desk.

"No, sir!"

"Come and share mine!"

I said good-bye to Dr. Ward and walked down the corridor to where Hammond sat. He looked more the fashionable club man than ever, though he did have a slight sprinkling of dandruff on his coat collar. I was quick to notice this, as I had been quick to notice Miss Martin's few, close-scizzored hairs on her fine, thinking face.

Lunch!

But I was not to be taken out to a meal in a restaurant, as anyone might expect, but Hammond sat me down on a chair by his side, and he handed me a glass of buttermilk and a few compressed oatmeal cakes.

* * * * *

I had stayed over night at the Phi-Mu House, at Columbia, with Ally. I had stayed up nearly all night, rather, arguing, in behalf of extreme socialism, with the boys ... till people, hearing our voices through the open windows, had actually gathered in the street without.

"You're utterly mad, but we like you!" said one of the boys.

In the morning, before I clutched my suitcase in my hand and started for Perfection City, Ally showed me something that had come in the morning mail, which startled me. It was a clipping from the Laurel _Globe_--a vilely slanderous article, headed, "Good Riddance."...

And first it lied that I had run away from my "confederates" of the Scoop Club, leaving them to bear the onus of the investigation of the town's morals ... which was, of course, not true ... I had made a special point of going to the sheriff and asking him if I would be needed. If so, I would defer my trip East. And he had replied that it would be all right for me to go....

But the second count--the personal part of the story, was more atrocious ... it intimated that I had, during my sojourn at Laurel, been an undesirable that would have made Villon pale with envy ... an habitué of the Bottoms ... that I had been sleeping with negro women and rolling about with their men, drunk.

I was so furious at this that I dropped my suitcase, clenched my hands, and swore that I was straightway going to freight it back and knock all his teeth down "Senator's" Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!

* * * * *

Once more Baxter wrote me, urging me to come to Eden. He told me his wife would welcome me ... and jested clumsily that his secretary would be just the girl to marry me and take care of me....

Jested? I did not know the man yet ... he meant it.

* * * * *

Though I was possessed of a curious premonitory warning that I must not accept his invitation and was, besides, settled in a hut by the lake shore, yet I was tempted to go to Eden....

For one thing, Perfection City was no longer the place of ideals it had been ... it was now a locality where the poorer bourgeoisie sent their wives and children, for an inexpensive summer outing....

Wavering this way and that, I sent a telegram which clinched the matter.

"Will leave for Eden to-morrow morning. John Gregory."

* * * * *

Not far from the little suburban station to which I had changed, lay the Single Tax Colony of Eden. When I dropped off the train and found no one to greet me, I was slightly piqued. Of a labourer in a nearby field I inquired the way to Eden. He straightened his back, paused in his work.

He gave me the direction--"and there by the roadside you'll find a sort of wooden archway with a sign over it ... you step in and follow the path, and that will take you right into the centre of the community. But what do want to go to Eden for? they're all a bunch of nuts there!"

"Maybe I might be a nut, too!"

The old man laughed.

"Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny."

Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly with manuscripts....

A woodland path led me into what seemed, and was, a veritable forest; boughs interlaced above, with glimpses of blue sky between. In interspaces of trees wild flowers grew. Luxuriant summer was abroad.

I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community. It was in a beautiful open space like a natural meadow.

There stood the houses of the colonists--Single Taxers, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists,--folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back again to pastoral simplicity.

It was a community such as William Morris or some Guild Socialist of a medieval turn of mind might have conceived. It was the Dream of John Ball visualised.

"When Adam dolve and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?"

Toy houses picturesquely set under trees that fringed the Common ... houses with different, quaint colours ... the "green" in the centre carefully cropped as if nibbled by sheep ... well-kept paths of parti-coloured stone, as if each pebble had been placed there by hand....

Everything here was born obviously of the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement which seeks to teach that each shall make and build for himself ... if clumsily, yet uniquely ... the product to be something at least individual and warm from the maker's personality.

I thought of Jusserand's _English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages_. If the Canterbury Pilgrims, led by jolly Harry Bailey, their host, had burst out from the woods, on horseback, singing and jesting, I should not have considered their appearance an anachronism....

A tousle-headed girl-child in rompers which she was too big for, pointed me Baxter's house, the largest in the community.

There seemed to be no one home when I dropped my suitcase on the front porch....

I knocked vigorously. No one came. I waited a long while.

"A hell of a way to welcome me!" I meditated, my egotism hurt.

Again I knocked.

"Come in! do come in!" a gentle voice bade--it was Mrs. Baxter's.

I pushed the door open and stepped in. I set down my heavy suitcase with a thump, on the bare, hardwood floor of the large room in which I found myself--a room sparsely furnished, its walls lined with books. It had one large window, under and along which was built in, a long, wide shelf made into a sort of divan, promiscuous with cushions.

Propped up with a disordered heap of these cushions sat Mrs. Hildreth Baxter, in blouse and bloomers; she was reading.

"Why, Johnnie Gregory!" she cried, swinging her graceful, slim legs down, and rising, coming toward me, extending her hand in greeting....

"Why, Johnnie Gregory--YOU here!"

"Yes, didn't you!--"

"I _knew_ I was right ... Penton maintained it was to-morrow you were due--Darrie sided with him--Darrie is a friend of mine who is visiting us, from Virginia--but Ruth, Mubby's secretary," she finished, relapsing into her intimate petting name for her husband, (Mubby is short for "My hubby")--"Ruth sided with me, though we had quite an argument about it."

"And you and Ruth were right!"

"Yes, I was right," she assented, leaving "Ruth" out, with naïve egoism.

"Sit down in the morris chair ... you look dusty and heated ... I'll entertain you ... I'm all alone ... Penton is dictating an article to Ruth. Darrie's washing her hair. I'm the only member of the Leisure Class. I'm lazing here, reading Gorky's latest novel."

What an engaging, pretty, naïve, little woman this was! I commented inwardly. A sweet aroma of feminine health breathed from her body, bosom, hair--a tumbly black mass--as perfume breathes from a wild flower.

Strangely enough, I felt calm and happy in her presence; at home, as I had never been with any woman or girl before.

Up to this moment, when alone with a woman, timidity had touched me to ice, while inwardly I had trembled with suppressed passion and fright.

Set in the midst of a group of women, I shone. As at the university, when I used to visit whole sorority chapters at once, and, with from five to ten girls seated about me in the parlour, talk brilliantly and easily and poetically with all of them. Left alone with any _one_, my mouth dried like sand, my tongue clove to my palate, I shook all over as with a palsy.

With Hildreth Baxter I was straightway, marvellously, at my ease. We talked of Keats--she seemed to know all of his verse by heart....

Shelley--she quoted his less-known fragments....

"O WORLD! O LIFE! O TIME!--"

"O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb, Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more--Oh, never more!

"Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight; Fresh spring, and summer, and the winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more--Oh, never more!"

"Surely that does not express your feelings--and you still a young and beautiful woman?"

"No, but I am profoundly moved by the sad beauty of it; and by the fact that perhaps Poe got his refrain of 'nevermore' for his _Raven_ as a reminiscence from it."