Chapter 31

She laughed engagingly with feminine inconsequence and stooped down to recover a slight, silver bracelet that had slipped off over one of her small hands. I caught a brief glimpse of the white division of her breasts as she stooped over. The vision stabbed my heart with keen enjoyment that pained....

Already we were caught up in a current of mysterious fellow-feeling that was soon to bear us onward to the full ocean of frank love and passion. Though at this time neither she nor I perceived it.

* * * * *

Penton came in ... the little, handsome, red-faced man, with his Napoleonic head too large for his small, stocky body ... his large, luminous eyes like those of the Italian fisher boy in the painting ... his mouth a little too large ... his chin a trifle too heavy-jowled. His hands were feminine ... but his feet were encased in heavy shoes that made them seem the feet of a six-foot day labourer....

Ruth, his secretary, coming close behind him,--was tall, not ungraceful in an easy, almost mannish way ... slab-figured ... built more like a boy than a young woman dangerously near the old maid. She too wore bloomers. Her face was tanned. It was too broad and placid for either prettiness or beauty, but a mischievous tilt to the nose and large calm hazel eyes kept her this side of mere plainness....

Penton glanced from me to his wife, from his wife to me, in one look of instinctive inquiry, before he addressed me....

"Well, Johnnie, here you are ... East at last ... and about to become a real literary man."

"He's been here a full hour ... we didn't want to interrupt you--" his wife explained.

"Your work is too important for the world"--I began sincerely and reverently.

Baxter beamed. His being expanded under my worship.

He caught both my hands, friendlily, in his.

"Welcome to Eden," then, introducing, "this is my secretary, Miss Ruth Hazlitt; she's been quite keen to meet you ... we've talked of you a lot ... she knows your poetry and thinks you're a genius, and will some day be recognised as a great poet."

Ruth Hazlitt nodded, shy, took my hand in introduction.

"Darrie, oh, Dar-_rie_!" called Baxter ... "a Southern society girl, but a mighty good radical already," he explained to me, _sotto voce_, as we heard sounds of her approach.

Mary Darfield Malcolm came in, in a flimsy dressing gown of yellow, with blue ribbons in it, her hair wet and still done up in a towel. Superbly she trusted to her big eyes of limpid brown, and to the marble-like pallour of her complexion, the twin laughing dimples in her cheeks ... she added her welcome to the others ... easily, with a Southern way of speech that caught each recalcitrant word by the tail and caressed its back as it came out....

* * * * *

That afternoon, at Baxter's suggestion, he and I launched forth on a walk together....

"There is some beautiful country for walking about here."

* * * * *

"Darrie, will you and Ruth have the veal steak cooked by six o'clock?"

I noticed that he did not include his wife. Also, I looked at him in amazement ... a look the significance of which he instantly caught ... Steak? Meat?

"I've done a lot of experimenting in dietetics," he explained, "and I have finally been brought to face the fact, after years of vegetarianism, that there's nothing like a good steak for a brain-worker. It's easily digested and affords ready nourishment ... vegetables, yes ... but it takes up so much vital energy to digest them ... the meat-eating races are the dominant races of the world ... but," he flashed quickly, "I always try to be logical and consistent. If I eat meat, I must be willing to kill the animal I eat. I must not stand off in dainty horror over the butcher's trade, while I live by it."

"Surely you don't mean that you do your own butchering?"

"No ... not that ... but I've proven to myself that I can kill ... we had a dog, a mongrel, that attached itself to us ... tore up everything in my study ... tore the sheets and pillow slips on the beds ... I took it out into the woods," he ended gravely, "and killed ... shot it ... of course I had to summon up all my resolution ... but I did it."

While admitting the almost childlike exactness of my friend's logic, I could not help smiling to myself at his grotesque sincerity....

We walked far ... through green fields ... over flashing brooks ... through lovely woodland vistas ... we paused on the top of a hill, with vistas all about us ... just as we had done on Azure Mound in Kansas....

"I asked you to take this walk with me in order to tell you something.... Johnnie, you're my friend, and that is why I don't want you to stay at my house with us. I want you to put up at the Community Inn, at my expense ... eat your meals with us, of course."

I was surprised. He did not want me in the house _because I was his friend_!... in silence I waited his further explanation....

"Yes," he continued, "I want to spare you trouble ... Hildreth and I, you see," he proceeded with painful frankness, "are quite near the breaking point ... I don't think we'll be together very many months longer ... and ... and ... I don't want you to become involved ... for I'm simply desperate."

"But, Penton, how could I become involved?"

"Johnnie, you don't know women, or you wouldn't ask ... especially women of my wife's type ... hysterical, parasitic, passionate, desperate.... I tell you what, you stay at the inn!"

A pause;--I was startled by what he said next:

"Besides, it's time you had a mate, a real mate ... and I," he proceeded with incredible gravity, "I have been urging Ruth, my secretary, to take you ... you and she would be quite happy together ... she can support herself, for instance ... that would place no economic burden on you."

"Really, Penton!" I demurred.

I was learning how utterly bookish, how sheerly a literary man Penton Baxter was ... and how absurd, at the same time. How life never drew near him, how he ever saw it through the film of his latest theory, and tried to order his own, as well as everybody else's life, to jibe with it....

* * * * *

"Penton, it is a matter of indifference to me where I put up. It was you who invited me to come to Eden ... but I won't mind staying at Community Inn, as I can only be with you for a couple of weeks, anyhow ... I'm due to take a cattleboat for Paris, for Europe, as soon as I have _Judas_ finished."

* * * * *

Supper ... veal steaks served on a plain board table outside the big house, under a tree. We waited on ourselves. We discussed Strindberg, his novels and plays ... his curious researches in science ... Nietzsche....

Afterward, having eaten off wooden plates, we flung the plates in the fireplace, burning them ... Ruth washed the knives, forks, spoons....

"It's such a saving of effort to use wooden plates and paper napkins ... so much less mere household drudgery ... so much more time for living saved."

I had taken my suitcase and was about to repair to the much-discussed inn. But Penton asked me to wait, while he had a conference with the three women of the household.

Soon he came out, smiling placidly and blandly.

"Johnnie, I'm sorry about this afternoon ... I've been rather hasty, rather inhospitable ... you are not to go to the inn, but stay with us. The girls have persuaded me ... the tent, down beside the little house, is yours all summer, if you like."

* * * * *

I found the tent in a clump of trees ... it had a hard board floor, a wash-stand, table, chair, and cot.

Along with the rest of the household, I retired early ... but not to sleep.

I lit my big kerosene lamp and sat propped up with the pillows, reading, till late, the poetry of Norah May French, the beautiful, red-headed girl who had, like myself, also lived in Eos, where Roderick Spalton's Artworks were....

She had been, Penton informed me, when he handed me her book, one of the famous Bohemians of the San Francisco and Carmel art and literary crowd....

After a brief career of adventurous poverty, she had committed suicide over a love affair.

Her poetry was full of beauty and spontaneity ... a grey mist dancing full of rainbows, like those you see at the foot of Niagara....

I must have read myself to sleep, for the lamp was still lit when I woke up early with the dawn ... it was the singing of the birds that woke me on my second day at Eden....

Working on farms, in factories, on ships at sea, being up at all hours to catch freights out of town had instilled in me the habit of early rising; I would have risen at dawn anyhow without the birds to wake me.

Turning over for my pencil, which I ever keep, together with a writing pad, at my bedside, to catch the fleeting poetic inspiration, I indited a sonnet to Baxter (all copies of which I have unfortunately lost or I would give it here) in which I sang his praises as a great man of the same rank as Rousseau and Shelley.

In spite of the fact that I was fully aware of all his absurdities and peccadilloes, the true greatness of the man remained, and still remains, undimmed in my mind.

* * * * *

High day. I walked along the path, past the little house where Baxter sequestered himself when he wished to be alone to think or write; it was close to my tent, around a corner of trees. I tiptoed religiously by it, went on up to the big house where the three women slept, as if drawn to their abode by a sort of heliotropism.

The whole house stood in quiet, the embodiment of slumber.

* * * * *

A lank, flat-chested woman came up the path from the opposite direction ... dressed drab in one long, undistinguished gown like a Hicksite or Quaker, without the hood ... her head was bare ... her fine, brown hair plaited flat.

"Good morning!"

"Good morning," she replied, a query in her voice.

"I am John Gregory, the poet," I explained. "I arrived yesterday on a visit to the Baxters."

She said she had heard of me ... she opened the door and went into the house. I followed.

She was the wife of Anarchist Jones, of whom I had already heard the household speak--as a difficult, recalcitrant member of the colony.

The Joneses were very poor. They had two children and lived in a mere shack on the outskirts of the community. Jones was a shoemaker. His wife came twice a week to clean up and set things to rights in the Baxter menage--his two houses. I took care of the tent myself, while I was there....

By this time Darrie, Ruth, and Mrs. Baxter were up. I sat in the library, in the morris chair, deeply immersed in the life of Nietzsche, by his sister. Nevertheless I was not so preoccupied as not to catch fugitive glimpses of kimonos disappearing around door-corners ... women at their mysterious morning ritual of preparing themselves against the day.

Comfortable of mind, at ease in heart and body, I sat there, dangling one leg over the arm of the chair. I was much at home in the midst of this easy, disjointed family group.

* * * * *

We were, the four of us--Darrie, Hildreth, Ruth, and I--seated together at our outdoor table, scooping out soft-boiled eggs.

Hildreth Baxter had boiled my two eggs medium for me ... to the humorous, affected consternation of Darrie and Ruth, which they, of course, deliberately made visible to me, with the implication--

"You'd best look out, when Penton's lazy little wife waits on you ... she is the one who generally demands to be waited on, and if--"

* * * * *

And now, for the moment, all of us were combined against the master of the house ... furtively and jocularly combined, like naughty children....

Hildreth smuggled forth her coffee percolator, which she kept hidden from her husband's search ... and we soon, by the aid of an alcohol stove, had a cup of fragrant coffee a-piece ... which Darrie made....

"Penton swears coffee is worse than whiskey, the rankest of poisons. We have to hide the percolator from him."

"He lies a-bed late, when he wakes. He lies there thinking out what he will later on dictate to Ruth.... we can finish before--"

But just then Penton himself came hurrying up the path from the little cottage.

When he saw what we were doing he gave us such a look of solemn disgust that we nearly smothered with laughter, which we tried to suppress.

"When you take that percolator off the table--" he stood aloof, "I'll sit down with you."

Then we laughed outright, not in disrespect of him, but as children laugh at a humorous incident at school.

"Oh, yes, it might seem funny ... so does a drunken man who gives up his reason to a drug seem funny.... but it's no more a joke than that ... coffee is a vile poison ... I have a sense of humour," he continued, turning to me, "just as keen as the next one ... but I know, by scientific research, just how much damage that stuff does."

* * * * *

I read my sonnet to Penton, in a grave, respectful voice.

Peace was patched. We then sat together, under the chequered shade of the big tree which towered over our table ... Baxter waxed as eloquent as an angel ... the wonderful, absurd, little man.

Daniel came romping out for breakfast.

* * * * *

Penton reached for the morning's mail. He climbed into the hammock and read, with all the joy of a boy, the huge bunch of press clippings about himself, his activities, his work ... a daily procedure of his, I was to learn. He chuckled, joked, was immensely pleased ... handed me various items to read, or read choice bits aloud to all of us.

After all, though I pretended to criticise, to myself ... yet, in my heart, I liked his frank rejoicing in his fame, his notoriety, and only envied him his ability to do so.

* * * * *

I returned to my tent to work, as I had planned to do each morning, on my play _Judas_. The dialogue would not come to me ... I laid it aside and instead was inspired to set down instantly the blank verse poem to the play:--

"A noise of archery and wielded swords All night rang through his dreams. When risen morn Let down her rosy feet on Galilee Blue-vistaed, on the house-top Judas woke: Desire of battle brooded in his breast Although the day was hung with sapphire peace, And to his inner eye battalions bright Of seraphim, fledged with celestial mail, Came marching up the wide-flung ways of dawn To usher in the triumph-day of Christ.... But sun on sun departed, moon on moon, And still the Master lingered by the way, Iscariot deemed, dusked in mortality And darkened in the God by flesh of man. For Judas a material kingdom saw And not a realm of immaterial gold, A city of renewed Jerusalem And not that New Jerusalem, diamond-paved With love and sapphire-walled with brotherhood, Which He, the Master, wrestled to make plain With thews of parable and simile-- So ''tis the flesh that clogs him,' Judas thought (A simple, earnest man, he loved him well And slew him with great friendship in the end); 'Yea, if he chose to say the word of power, The seraphim and cherubim, invoked, Would wheel in dazzling squadrons down the sky And for the hosts of Israel move in war As in those holy battles waged of yore'....

* * * * *

"Ah, all the world now knows Gethsemane, But few the love of that betraying kiss!"

* * * * *

I did not have to be very long at Eden to learn that the community was divided into two parties: the more conservative, rooted element whom success was making more and more conservative,--and the genuinely radical crowd. The anarchist, Jones, led the latter group, a very small one.

As far as I could see, this anarchist-shoemaker held the right. On my third day in Eden my interest in the community life about me led me to inquire my way to the place where Jones lived ... a shack built practically in its entirety of old dry goods boxes ... a two-room affair with a sort of enlarged dog-kennel adjunct that stood out nearer the road--Jones's workshop.

The man looked like the philosopher he was--the anarchist-philosopher, as the newspapers were to dub him ... as he sat there before his last, hammering away at the shoe he was heeling, not stopping the motions of his hands, while he put that pair aside, to sew at another pair, while he discoursed at large with me over men and affairs.

"What is all this trouble I'm hearing about?" I asked him.

"Trouble?--same old thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started, this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head, worsened him, since,--as it has done with many a good man before. Now he goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or anything else that he knows nothing about....

"But it isn't that that I object to ... it is that he's allowing the original object of this colony, and of the Single Tax Idea, to become gradually perverted here. We're becoming nothing but a summer resort for the aesthetic quasi-respectables ... these folk are squeezing us poor, honest radicals out, by making the leases prohibitive in price and condition."

He stopped speaking, while he picked up another pair of shoes, examined them, chose one, and began sewing a patch on it....

He rose, with his leathern apron on, and saw me out....

"--glad you came to see old Jones ... you'll see and hear a lot more of me, the next week or so!" and he smiled genially, prophetically.

He looked like Socrates as he stood there ... jovially homely, round-faced ... head as bald as ivory ... red, bushy eyebrows that were so heavy he shrugged them....

"I'm just beginning the fight (would you actually believe it) for free speech here ... it takes a radical community, you know, to teach the conservatives how to suppress freedom....

"You must come around to the big barn Friday night, after the circus."

"--the circus?"

"Oh, we have a circus of our own every summer about this time ... we represent the animals ourselves ... some of us don't need to make up much, neither, if we only knew it," he roared.

"After the imitation circus, the real circus will begin. I have compelled the announcement of a general meeting to discuss my grievances, and that of others, who are not game enough to speak for themselves."

* * * * *

I found nobody but Hildreth--Mrs. Baxter--at home, when I returned. She was lying back in the hammock where Penton lounged to read his news clippings ... near the outdoor table ... dressed easily in her bloomers and white middy blouse with the blue bow tie ... her great, brown eyes, with big jet lashes, drooping langourously over her healthy, rounded cheeks ... her head of rich, dark hair touseled attractively. She was reading a book. I caught the white gleam of one of her pretty legs where the elastic on one side of her bloomers had slipped up.

Alone with her, a touch of my old almost paralytic shyness returned ... but the pathway to my tent lay so near her hammock I would almost brush against its side in passing....

She looked up. She gazed at me indefinitely, as if coming back from a far dream to reality.

"Oh, Johnnie Gregory! You?" fingering her hair with flexible fingers like a violinist trying his instrument.

"Yes!" I stopped abruptly and flushed.

"Did Jones like you?"

"I think he did."

"Jones is an eccentric ... but nine-tenths of the time he is right in his contentions ... his moral indignations ... it is his spirit of no compromise that defeats him."

With that she reached out one hand to me, with that pretty droop of the left corner of her mouth, that already had begun to fascinate me....

"Help me up ... a hammock's a nice place to be in, but an awkward thing to get out of."

I took her hand and helped her rise to a sitting posture.

"Ruth's in the little house typing ... Penton and Darrie are a-field taking a walk."

I paused where I was. Mrs. Baxter stood directly in the pathway that led to my tent. And the second act of _Judas_ had begun to burn in my brain, during my vigorous walk back from Jones's shack....

* * * * *

"In the yard of an inn at Capernaum. On the left stands the entrance to the inn. In the extreme background lies the beach, and, beyond, the Sea of Galilee. A fisherboat is seen, drawn up on shore. Three fishermen discovered mending nets, at rise of curtain."

The stage was set for the second act. I must get the play finished in the rough. I owed this much to Mr. Derek, who was faithfully backing me--if not to my own career ... and already I had succeeded in interesting Mitchell Kennerley, the new young publisher, in my effort. After the book was disposed of ... then Europe ... then London ... then Paris, and all the large life of the brilliant world of intellect and literature that awaited me.

But, at the present, one small, dainty, dark woman unconsciously stood in my pathway. I looked into Hildreth Baxter's face with caution, strangely disquieted, but proud to be outwardly self-possessed.

"Let's _us_ take a walk," she suggested.

"No, I must go to my tent and write!"

"Oh, come now ... don't you be like Mubby!... that's the way _he_ talks."

"All right," I assented, amazed at her directness, "I'll put my work by for the day--though the entire dialogue of the three Galilean fishermen about the miracle of the great draught of fishes is at this very moment burning in my brain."

She laid her hand lightly, but with an electric contact, on the bend of my arm, and off we started, into the inviting fields.

Not far out, we came across a group of romping children. They were shouting and chasing one another about, as happy dogs do when overjoyed with excessive energy.

The example the children set was contagious.... Hildreth and I were soon romping too--when out of the former's sight. We took hands and ran hard down a hill, and half-way up another one opposite, through our own natural impetus.

We changed our mood, strolling slowly and thoughtfully till we came to a small rustic bridge, so pretty it seemed almost like stagecraft, that spanned, at one leap, one of the countryside's innumerable, flashing brooks. We stood looking over into the foaming, speeding water.

"There's one thing sure about Eden ... in spite of the squabbles and disagreements of the elders, the place is a children's paradise."

"That's only because they have all nature for their backyard--no thanks to their elders," Hildreth answered, looking up into my face with a quick smile, "the grown-ups find misery wherever, they go."

"Does that mean that you are unhappy?"

"I suppose I should say 'no.'"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Neither do I, then."

Again that sweet, tantalizing, enigmatic droop of her mouth's corner.

We strolled further ... into the fields again ... with linked comradely hands. It seemed that she and I had been born brother and sister in some impossible pastoral idyll.

* * * * *

A change in our spirit again. A fresh desire to romp.

"Let's play just as if we were children, too."

"Tag! You're _it_!" and I touched her arm and ran. She ran after me in that curious loping fashion peculiar to women. I turned and wound like a hare. She stopped, breathless. "That's no fair!" she cried, "you're running too fast."

"Well, then, I'll almost stand still, then see if you can catch me!"

She made at me, shouting, her face flushed with the exercise. I ducked and swerved and doubled.

"You're quite quick and strong," she exclaimed, admiringly, as I caught her by the shoulders.

I stooped over, hunching my back.

"Come on, play leap-frog," I invited. She hesitated, gave a run at me, put both hands on my back, but caught her left leg on my neck. We collapsed in a laughing heap, she on top of me.

Slowly we disentangled ourselves. I reached a hand and helped her up.