Chapter 36

"If she set eyes on you," I replied, "she'd fly at you and scratch your eyes out--in her present mood."

"Only _show_ me where she is, then--point out the place."

"If I find you snooping around, you'll need hospital attention for a long time."

"Then you won't help facilitate the proceedings, secretly?"

"No, since you've begun this game, find out what you can yourself. What do you think I am?"

"A very foolish young man to treat me so when I am still your best friend."

"Here comes the north-bound train. You hop aboard and go on back to New York."

Seething with rage, I caught Penton Baxter by the arm and thrust him up the steps....

* * * * *

Next morning came a letter from Darrie, from the Martha Washington. We were the talk of the town, she told us.

She had tried to keep Penton from employing detectives to follow us. She advised us to return to New York--we must be out of money by this time....

Hildreth could stay at her mother's and father's flat till we made further arrangements for going off some place together.

* * * * *

"Darling, if we return from what has proven to be a wild-goose chase, will you promise me not to become disheartened, to lose faith in me?"

"Of course not, Johnnie ... I think Darrie offered very good advice," she sighed.

Back we turned, by the next day's train, full of a sense of frustration; what an involved, unromantic, practical world we lived in!

* * * * *

Hildreth heaved a sigh of content as we walked into her mother's flat again. Her mother was still at Eden ... alone ... taking care of Daniel, for whom she had a great love.

We had Darrie over the telephone, and soon she was with us, giving us the latest news of the uproar.

The papers were at us pro and con, mostly con.

Dorothy Dix had written a nasty attack on me, saying that I was climbing to fame over a woman's prostrate body ... that, in my own West, instead of a judge and a divorce court, a shotgun Would have presided in my case....

The _Globe_ was running a forum, suddenly stopped, as to whether people of genius and artistic temperament should be allowed more latitude than ordinary folk....

As Hildreth and I rode down Broadway together, side by side, unrecognised, on a street car, we saw plastered everywhere, "Stop That Affinity Hunt," a play of that name to be shown at Maxime Elliott's Theatre....

I must admit that I was pleased with the sudden notoriety that had come to me ... years of writing poetry had made my name known but moderately, here and there ... but having run away with a famous man's wife, my name was cabled everywhere ... even appeared in Japanese, Russian, and Chinese newspapers....

* * * * *

But this was not what I wanted of the papers ... I must use this space offered me to propagandise my ideas of free love....

So I arranged to meet Penton privately in the lobby of the Martinique.

* * * * *

Hildreth and I were there, waiting, before Penton came the next day. Appearing, he wore the old, bland, childlike smile, and he shook hands with us as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Someone had tipped off the reporters and they were on time, too, crowding about us eagerly. One young fellow from the _Sun_, looking like a graduate from a school of divinity, asked a special interview of me alone, which I gave ... afterward ... in a corner.

That _Sun_ reporter gave me the fairest deal I ever received. He talked with me over an hour, without ever setting pencil to paper ... the other interviews were long over, Penton had left, Hildreth sat chafing....

"Come over and join us, Hildreth."

She sat listening in silence while I continued rehearsing all my ideas on marriage, love, divorce ... how love should be all ... how there should, ideally, be no marriage ceremony ... but if any at all, only after the first child had been born ... how the state should have nothing to do with the private love-relations of the individual....

The reporter from the _Sun_ shook hands good-bye.

"But you haven't taken a single note!" I protested.

"I have it all here, in my head."

"But how can you report me accurately?"

"See to-morrow's _Sun_."

* * * * *

The interview with me was a marvel in two ways: it represented to a hair's breadth everything I had pronounced, transmuted into the reporter's own style of writing ... it curtailed my conversation where I had repeated myself or wandered off into trivial detail.

* * * * *

"I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas!" I had exclaimed to Hildreth, in the hearing of the reporters.

"Oh, bother Kansas!" replied Hildreth humorously.

For a month "I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas" was a catch-word for Broadway and the town.

When the _Evening Journal_ put us in their "Dingbat Family" I enjoyed the humour of it. But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.

"You and Penton," remarked she, "for men of culture and sensibility, have bigger blind spots than ordinary in your make-up. Why, Johnnie, I believe you enjoy the comic pictures about this business!...

"The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced--not through newspaper interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting."

* * * * *

Baxter's lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ... "collusion," he warned Penton; "they'll call it collusion and you won't get your final decree."

Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cluster of them ... "_Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit_" ... with dogs' heads on all of us ... Hildreth, with the head of a hound dog, long hound-ears flopping, with black jade ear-rings in them ... Penton, a woe-begone little pug....

A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, "_The Affinity Nest of the Hobo Poet_," I think it was legended ... then I was drawn standing, one leg crossed over the other, the peak of the toe jauntily resting on the ground, hand-in-breast like an old-fashioned picture. There was a tin can thrown over the shoulder of the tattered bulldog that represented me ... one of my ears went through my hat ... beneath, a rhyme ran:

"I am the hobo poet, I lead a merry life: One day I woo the Muse, the next, Another fellow's wife!"

* * * * *

I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West Grove, N.J., where we had gone finally to escape the city, and the swarm of reporters that seemed never to cease pursuing us ... for, when we found out that they did not want propaganda, we sought to hide away from them....

Hildreth had been rather gloomy at breakfast that morning, and I thought she would join in a laugh with me over Tad's horse-play. There is a streak in me that makes me enjoy the grotesque slap-stick of the comic artists.

When Hildreth saw the cartoons, she laughed a little, at first; then she wept violently.

Then she wrote a savage letter to Tad, letting him know what she thought of his vulgarity.

* * * * *

"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."

Nevertheless, it was the humanness in me that brought all the reporters who came to interview us to sympathise with Hildreth and me, instead of with Penton.

* * * * *

Yes, we had found our dream-cottage ... back in the lovely pines, near West Grove. At a nominal sum of fifteen dollars a month; the actress who owned it, sympathising with our fight, had rented it to me for the fall and winter ... if we could stand the bitter cold in a summer cottage....

There Hildreth stayed, seemingly alone, with Darrie, who had come down to chaperon her. To the reporters who sought her out when her place of retreat became known, she averred that she had no idea of my whereabouts. In the meantime, under the name of Mallory, I was living near by, was renting a room in the house of a Mrs. Rond, whose husband was an artist.

I came and went to and from my cottage by a bye-path through the pines that led to the back door.

Darrie, as we called her, performed the most difficult task of all--the task of remaining friends to all parties concerned.

The strain was beginning to tell on Penton. A strange, new, unsuspected thing was welling up in his heart, Darrie averred ... his love for his repudiated wife was reviving so strongly that now he dared not see her, it would hurt him too deeply....

His friends, the Stotesburies, a wealthy radical couple, had let him have a cottage of theirs up in Connecticut, and he was staying in it all by himself, doing his own cooking and hurrying with a new book in order to get enough money to defray the enormous expenses he had incurred by initiating and prosecuting his divorce suit....

And now Daniel joined us. Daniel and I agreed with each other famously. For he liked me. He took walks with me, and we went bathing together after I had done my morning's writing. We crabbed in the Manasquan River, and fished.

Once, when I was galloping along the road in imitation of a horse, with him perched on my shoulders--

"Say, Johnnie, I like you ... I won't call you buzzer any more!"

"I like you, too, Daniel, but don't squeeze me so hard about the neck ... it's choking my wind off."

* * * * *

That was a happy month ... that month of fine, fairly warm fall weather that Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel and I spent together in the little cottage back in the woods, secluded from the road.

The newspapers had begun to let up on us a little. It had grown a bit galling and monotonous, the continual misrepresentations of ourselves and what Hildreth and I were trying to stand for.

* * * * *

Now that I was playing the conventional game of evasion and hypocritic subterfuge, holding a nominal lodging at Mrs. Rond's as one Mr. Arthur Mallory, and explaining my being seen with Mrs. Baxter by the statement that I was a writer sent down by a publishing house for the purpose of helping her with a book she was engaged in writing--

Though everybody knew well who I was, it assuaged the American passion for outward "respectability," and we were left, comparatively speaking, alone to do as we wished....

* * * * *

Hildreth was a spoiled, willful little rogue ... once or twice she tried a "soul-state" on me....

Walking through the pines one day, suddenly she sat down in her tracks, began crying, and affirmed in a tragic voice, that she couldn't stand the strain of what she had been through any longer, that she believed she was going crazy.

I immediately plumped down on all fours and began running up and down through the crashing underbrush, growling and making a great racket. Startled, intrigued, she watched me.

"Johnnie, don't be such a damn fool! What _are_ you doing?"

"I'm going crazy, too, I'm suffering the hallucination that I'm a big brown bear, and you're so sweet that I'm going to eat you all up."

I ran at her. She leaped up, pealing laughter. I began biting at her ankles ... at the calves of her legs ... "oof! oof! I'm going crazy too!" She squealed, delighted, her mind taken off her troubles ... she struck me on the head with her open hands, to keep me off ... I bowled her over with a swift, upward jump ... I picked her up and carried her off, kissing her.

* * * * *

"My darling big rascal ... my own Johnnie Gregory!" She caught me fondly by the hair, "I can't do anything with you at all!"

Once again, waking me up in the middle of the night:

"Johnnie, I--I have a dreadful impulse, an impulse to hit you ... I just can't help it, Johnnie dear! I must do it!" and she fetched me a very neat blow in the face.

"You don't mind, do you ... having your own little girl hit you?"

Now, poor Penton would have spent the remainder of the night taking this "impulse" and the act which followed it as a serious problem in aesthetics, economics, feminism, and what-not ... and the two would have talked and discussed, their voices sounding and sounding in philosophic disquisition ... and, before the end, Hildreth, persuaded to take the situation seriously and enjoying the morbid attention given her, Hildreth would have gone off several times into hysterics....

My procedure was a different one:

"--of course I don't mind you following your impulses ... you should ... but also I have just as imperative an impulse--now that you suggest it--to hit you."

And I was not chary of the vigorous blows I dealt her, a tattoo of them on her back....

"Why, Johnnie," she gasped, "you--hit--me!" and her big eyes, wide with hurt, filled with tears. And she cried a little....

"There, there, dear!" I soothed. Then, with a solemn look in my face, "I couldn't resist my impulse, either."

"You mustn't do that any more, Johnnie ... but,--you must let _me_ hit _you_ whenever I want to."

But she never had that "impulse" again.

* * * * *

But, though we romped a lot, Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel, and I,--and though Hildreth called me her "Bearcat" (the only thing she took from the papers, whose title for me was "The Kansas Bearcat") don't think that this made up all our life in our cottage....

In the morning, after breakfast, which Daniel and I usually ate together alone, we being the early risers of the household--I repaired to the large attic and wrote on my play. Then frequently I read and studied till four, keeping up my Latin and Greek and German, and my other studies.

Darrie also wrote and studied in her room.... Daniel led the normal life of the happy American boy, going where the other boys were, and playing with them--when he and I didn't go off, as I have said, for the afternoon, together, crabbing and fishing.

Hildreth, of course, was working hard at _her_ book--a novel of radical love....

After four was strolling time, for all of us ... along the river, by the ocean beach, further away ... or among the pines that reached up into our very backyard.

When the grocer boy or the butcher boy came, I (for the sake of outward appearances) stepped out of sight, though it irked me, still to resort to subterfuge, when we had launched forth with such a fanfare of publicity....

"Wait till Penton wins the decree, then we can come out into the open and live in a Free Union together--or _marry_!" Hildreth begged of me ... and I acquiesced, for the time....

* * * * *

Each evening, by the open fire, I read aloud from the poets ... or Darrie or Hildreth did ... happy evenings by fire-light, that shall always live pleasantly in my memory....

We had but few disagreements, and those trifling ones.

Darrie was herself in the midst of a romantic courtship. 'Gene Mallows, the Californian poet, had fallen madly in love with her, having met her during his brief visit to New York....

Every day Darrie received her two, three, even four letters from him, couched in the most beautiful literary phraseology ... and each letter invariably held a sonnet ... and that, too, of an amazingly high standard of poetic excellence, considering the number Mallows was dashing off every day ... many of them were quite lovely with memorable phrase, deft turn of fancy or thought.

* * * * *

Penton recalled Daniel to the city.... Afraid now that the papers might locate him with us....

We had a few warm mid-days of glorious sunshine still, and I often persuaded Darrie and Hildreth to take nude sunbaths with me back of the house ... which we enjoyed on outspread blankets, ever keeping a weather eye for intruders....

As we lay in the sun we read poetry aloud. And I read aloud much of a book that amounted to our Bible, Havelock Ellis's _Sex in Its Relation to Society_.

I might add, for the sake of the reader who may be prone to misinterpret, that our behaviour was quite innocent, as we lay about in that manner....

* * * * *

Our best friend was the artist's wife, Mrs. Rond ... she was, in her way, herself a character ... the poverty of her family was extreme. She had a numerous menage of daughters; and a horde of cats as pets. Whenever she walked away from her house the cats followed her in a long line, their tails gaily in the air, like little ships sailing.

Mrs. Rond smoked incessantly, rolling her own cigarettes, from packages of Plowboy tobacco....

Her conversation was crisp, nervous, keen. An intellectual woman of the highest type; with all her poverty, she preserved around her an atmosphere of aristocratic fineness (even if she did smoke Plowboy) which bespoke happier days, in an economic and social sense.

She was thoroughly radical, but quiet and unostentatious about it. She looked on me and Hildreth as play-children of the feminist movement.

I think it was the exaggerated maternal instinct in her that moved her to foster and champion Hildreth and me ... an instinct that made her gather in every stray cat she found on the road ... she is the only person I have ever known who could break through the reserve of the cat's nature, and make it as fond and sentimental as a dog is toward its master.

Mrs. Rond knew all the classics, and, in her library, which she never let go, when their economic crash came, were most of the English poets and essayists and novelists from Malory and Chaucer down to William Watson and W.L. George....

She made us welcome at her home. We formed a pleasant group together, the occupants of my little cottage back in the pines, and she, her valitudinarian husband, and her four daughters, the eldest of whom, Editha, was of an exquisite type of frail, fair beauty ... all her daughters had inherited their mother's keen-mindedness ... she had brought them up on the best in the thought, art, and literature of the world....

The relationship between mother and daughters was one more of delightful, understanding comradeship than anything else ... in spite of the fact of Mrs. Rond's over-developed maternal instincts ... a favourite trick of the two youngest daughters being to hide away upstairs and then call out in mock tones of agony, in order to enjoy the sight of their mother, running breathless, up from the kitchen or in from the yard, and up the stairs, pale with premonition of some accident or ill, and crying, "what's the matter? children, what's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing, mother ... we're only playing."

And her relief would be so great that she would forget to scold them for their childlike, unthinking cruelty.

* * * * *

Just before I had left Kansas to come East on my projected trip to Europe, the magazines had begun to buy my poems, the best of them--Now every poem of mine was sent hurriedly back with an accompanying rejection slip.

Yet I was sure that I was writing better than ever before.

Simonds, of the _Coming Nation_, and the editor of the Kansas City _Star_ were about the only editors who now took my work. I inferred rightly that my notoriety was what was tabooing me. I determined to run up to New York and find out for myself if this was true!

As I rode north along the flashes of sea, marsh, and town, I thought of my little flock that I had left behind for a day, with intense satisfaction and content. They were mine. Hildreth was my woman, Daniel had been my child for the space he was with us. And I held Darrie in friendly tenderness, much as the bourgeois business man holds the supernumerary women of his household, though she was by no means that, nor was she in any way dependent on me....

I was finding it very good to own, to possess, to take root; to be possessed and owned, in turn. I carried an obscure sense of triumph over Baxter.

* * * * *

Darrie, who had been to town the week before, had come back with a report of Penton's unhappiness, his belated acknowledgment that he was still, in spite of his battle against the feeling, deeply in love with his discarded wife. It was not so easy to tear her out of his heart, she had intertwined so deeply there ... eight years with a woman, and one child by her, and affection for her was no easy thing to root up from one's being.

"I sat there a long while with him in Riverside Park," Darrie reported, "it was chilly and he wore an old overcoat because he couldn't afford a new one. His hair was greying at the temples. He looked stooped, aging, frail as if an extra wind might lift him up and carry him away from me....

"He was worried about my having been brought into what he called 'the mess' ... wondered how the papers had not scented 'the other woman' in me, no matter how innocent I was of that appellation.

"He seemed so lonely ... admitted he was so lonely....

"Johnnie, you're both poor, dear innocents, that's what you are--

"But of the two of you, you are the harder, the best equipped to meet the shock of life ... for you will grow wiser, where Penton never will."

"How did Penton speak of me?"

"Splendidly--said he considered that in a way, perhaps, he had worked you a wrong, done an injustice to you."

"Nonsense, the poor little chap!"

"He made me cry, he acted so pathetic ... he seemed like a motherless little boy that needed a woman's love and protection."

"Darrie, why don't _you_ marry him?"

"Now you're trying to do with me as he tried to do with Ruth and you ... marry him ... no ... I'm--I think I'm--in love with 'Gene Mallows."

Penton was pleased to hear, she said, that Daniel and I had got on so nicely together, while he was down at West Grove....

* * * * *

So, as I rode in the dusty, bumping train, my mind reverted to our whole friendship together, and tenderness welled up in my heart for Penton Baxter.

* * * * *

In the office of the New York _Independent_ sat William Hayes Ward, old, bent over, with his triple-lensed glasses behind which his dim, enlarged eyes floated spectrally like those of a lemur.

He greeted me with a mixture of constraint and friendliness.

"Well, my boy, you've certainly got yourself into a mess this time."

"A 'mess,' Dr. Ward?" I interrogated, quoting back to him the word he had used,--with rebuke in my voice.

"How else shall I phrase it?"

"--with the understanding that I expect from an old friend, one who bought my first poems, encouraged my first literary endeavours,--who enheartened and helped me at the inception of my struggle for recognition and fame."

"And now you've won too much of the baser coinage of fame, of a kind that a poet should never have."

"I have a poem with me ... one on the subject of what Christ wrote on the sand--after which he bade the woman go and sin no more ... and he who was without sin should cast the first stone."

Dr. Ward looked over the half-moons of his triple glasses at me ... he reached for the poem and read it.

"Yes, it's a fine poem, with that uniqueness in occasional lines, that occasional touch of power, that marks your worst effusions, Mr. Gregory!... but," paused he, "we do not allow the _Woman Taken in Adultery_ in the columns of the _Independent_."

"Well," I shot back, pleased with myself at the retort I was making, "well, I'm mighty glad Christ didn't keep her out of the pages of the New Testament, Dr. Ward!"

He barely smiled. He fixed me with a steadfast look of concern.

"Are you still with--with Mrs. Baxter?"

"Yes--since you ask it."

"The sooner you put that woman out of your life the better for you."

"Dr. Ward--one moment!... understand that no woman I love can be spoken of as 'that woman' in my presence--if you were not an old man!--" I faltered, choking with resentment.